I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

[Dewar]

Did the city burn? Because, if so, you won.

[Bjorn]

Is this the Citizen Kane of Papers Please style video games?
 
 
 
Seriously though, a game that's about running a newspaper is like a perfect game for me.  More stuff on it here.

[Dewar]

Wow, that takes a lot of the visual flair from Papers Please. I mean I guess that ascetic isn't exactly uncommon, but it looks almost like a carbon copy.

[Vasari]

Wow, that's ridiculously similar. Oddly enough, Lucas Pope also made a game about running a newspaper and publishing articles to either support a government or a revolution. The Republia Times.

[Bjorn]

I haven't actually got around to playing Papers Please, in spite of having owned it since not long after it came out, so I don't really have a frame of reference for comparing it to this. 

[Professor Video Games]

I haven't actually got around to playing Papers Please, in spite of having owned it since not long after it came out, so I don't really have a frame of reference for comparing it to this. 

 

Forming opinions about games you haven't played is the Idle Thumbs Way.

 

Also, play Papers Please.

[miffy495]

So I was listening to The Predator in the car on the way home today, and is "Now I gotta Wet' Cha" the origin of the phrase "It's on like Donkey Kong"? Did Ice Cube invent that?

[Patrick R]

So I was listening to The Predator in the car on the way home today, and is "Now I gotta Wet' Cha" the origin of the phrase "It's on like Donkey Kong"? Did Ice Cube invent that?

 

http://blog.sfgate.com/parenting/2011/01/06/its-on-like-donkey-kong-a-comprehensive-history/

 

 

Anyway, I showed up to say...

 

The Princess Toadstool/Peach in Super Mario World is crazy off-brand. Just gross.

 

EDIT:

 

[syntheticgerbil]

Huh? She looks about right. She used to have brown hair and the American cartoon reflected that more. Seems to be pretty much in common with the depiction in Mario 3 and the more cartoony style of Mario World.

[Patrick R]

I tend to think of Toadstool/Peach either as Mario Bros. 2 or as Super Mario 64. 

[Vasari]

I was just watching an Aziz Ansari standup on Netflix, and at one point he did a joke about playing Halo with his cousin that went "Cause every time the board starts he grabs the rocket launcher and kills everyone", and I realised that Aziz Ansari is the kind of person who calls multiplayer levels in video games "boards." Why do people call them that? Maps, levels and stages I understand, but board is a weird term to apply to it. I've never seen an actual Video game use the word "board" to describe a level outside of something like maybe Mario Party, which makes sense because it's specifically based on boardgaming. It's a weird term to use and I can't get over it! I want to meet Aziz Ansari and ask him what the deal is.

[SuperBiasedMan]

The moralising introduction to Prison Architect is super weird. It basically teaches you the basics of how to play the game while questioning the ethics of the American prison industry by (quite poorly) trying to present a case that's ambiguous and hard to judge. But after that part anything I've played of the game is just "It's a sim where you build a prison"

 

It'd be like if the Sim City tutorial presented you with the dilemma of whether or not continued urbanisation is a sustainable future for the world or a way to slowly kill the planet while trying to insulate humanity from nature... and then just played like Sim City.

[tegan]

I was just watching an Aziz Ansari standup on Netflix, and at one point he did a joke about playing Halo with his cousin that went "Cause every time the board starts he grabs the rocket launcher and kills everyone", and I realised that Aziz Ansari is the kind of person who calls multiplayer levels in video games "boards." Why do people call them that? Maps, levels and stages I understand, but board is a weird term to apply to it. I've never seen an actual video game use the word "board" to describe a level outside of something like maybe Mario Party, which makes sense because it's specifically based on boardgaming. It's a weird term to use and I can't get over it! I want to meet Aziz Ansari and ask him what the deal is.

 

I feel like "board" is some weird holdover from midway games or something, like how some people still inexplicably call controllers "paddles" presumably because the controllers for Pong and its derivatives were filling in for actual ping-pong paddles. I've always felt like it might have to do with how early arcade games only had a single, non-scrolling screen, resembling very primitive electronic games where electronics might be use to supplement an actual tabletop-style game board. Like all the weird vintage crap that the Game Center CX guys would run into whenever they visited old Japanese arcades.

[tberton]

I think board comes from Pac-Man.

[Dewar]

The moralising introduction to Prison Architect is super weird. It basically teaches you the basics of how to play the game while questioning the ethics of the American prison industry by (quite poorly) trying to present a case that's ambiguous and hard to judge. But after that part anything I've played of the game is just "It's a sim where you build a prison"

 

It'd be like if the Sim City tutorial presented you with the dilemma of whether or not continued urbanisation is a sustainable future for the world or a way to slowly kill the planet while trying to insulate humanity from nature... and then just played like Sim City.

 

Yeah, that complaint was all the rage when they first added the tutorial. It's why I never ended up buying the game.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Yeah, that complaint was all the rage when they first added the tutorial. It's why I never ended up buying the game.

 

The thing is it seems totally absent after that, I just had fun with the other parts and the first time I played and entirely skipped the tutorial. It seems entirely representative but it absolutely turns people away.

[neonrev]

The moralising introduction to Prison Architect is super weird. It basically teaches you the basics of how to play the game while questioning the ethics of the American prison industry by (quite poorly) trying to present a case that's ambiguous and hard to judge. But after that part anything I've played of the game is just "It's a sim where you build a prison"

 

It'd be like if the Sim City tutorial presented you with the dilemma of whether or not continued urbanisation is a sustainable future for the world or a way to slowly kill the planet while trying to insulate humanity from nature... and then just played like Sim City.

 

I don't think it is representative (I think I might be misunderstanding your point there though) of what the game actually plays like. It implies this very personal, very serious management of a small prison and a serious take on the terrible realities of the justice system, but then the game never really makes you care or even know any of your prisoners, their in-game randomly generated crimes are either ridiculous lists of petty or violent crimes with no care to if any of it makes sense together, you can basically shove a couple dozen dudes in a single room with a toilet and enough beds and they'll be fine with it, the actual realities of the justice system are all (surreally) locked behind an upgrade tree (Research "Visitation rights." "Healthcare" "Prison Labor") and you don't actually have to engage all that much with them, and in my experience you basically get to choose between a gulag style prison labor camp or a nordic style full-rehabilitation prison. I still love the actual mechanics of setting up blocks and rooms and whatnot, but it's basically just including a shitty motion comic about an airport-crime-novel-esque murderer being executed before a simple DF with a different, weirdly politically awkward skin. It's just not good in any respect. It also used to be mandatory. Just a plain stupid decision from one of my favorite developers. I'd forgotten about it for a while, but boy do I hate it.

It's an interesting counter-example to the whole "British/european developers are the main developers taking on American culture in a semi-critical way." discussion about GTA, Mafia and the like. It doesn't work when you're not working off of movies and are trying to work off of an actually real, horrible, complicated and impersonal system. There's a lot of rich ground, I feel, in a game that pushes more on the real-life morality of the US penitentiary system (and private for-profit prisons in particular) by more directly working from the actual strangely gameified profit model of those prisons. 

[Gormongous]

...you can basically shove a couple dozen dudes in a single room with a toilet and enough beds and they'll be fine with it, the actual realities of the justice system are all (surreally) locked behind an upgrade tree (Research "Visitation rights." "Healthcare" "Prison Labor") and you don't actually have to engage all that much with them, and in my experience you basically get to choose between a gulag style prison labor camp or a nordic style full-rehabilitation prison...

 

I continue to wait for the sign that Prison Architect has finally gotten it together in terms of its thematic treatment of the prison-industrial complex, but instead I keep hearing stuff like this and it bums me out. There's an upgrade tree? Logic dictates that stuff like healthcare and labor would be held back by the demographics of your prison, but I guess they're not interested in deepening the simulation of the prison population to the point where viable strategies arise out of emergent gameplay rather than gated mechanics? This continues to be a confusing and slightly off-putting game for me...

[SuperBiasedMan]

Yup, you misunderstood. Because I basically agree with all you just said (though I didn't know about those upgrades). I'll play more but I don't see it as being very prison based, it's just a building sim with some different ideas (ie people literally have to run around and build it while it's inhabited), so the research thing IS baffling but it's not the only dumb decision that holds back the game from making a good depiction.

[neonrev]

Okay yeah, I was tired and didn't get the representative thing. Just got to thinking on it. It really just isn't actually about prisons, yeah. I keep waiting for the mod community to do a more comprehensive reskin of the thing. I think the building, time scheduling, research and layout style would really compliment a summer camp or school theme. Trying to layout the school so people can get to classes on time, making sure enough space and food is available for lunch time, dealing with the limitations of preexisting buildings and layout with a growing student body. Trying to fit all necessary construction and refurbishment into short summers. I really want that.

 

I continue to wait for the sign that Prison Architect has finally gotten it together in terms of its thematic treatment of the prison-industrial complex, but instead I keep hearing stuff like this and it bums me out. There's an upgrade tree? Logic dictates that stuff like healthcare and labor would be held back by the demographics of your prison, but I guess they're not interested in deepening the simulation of the prison population to the point where viable strategies arise out of emergent gameplay rather than gated mechanics? This continues to be a confusing and slightly off-putting game for me...

If you watch their videos that introduce each update it gets even more confusing. They're pretty bought in to their own simulation, which is a danger in that field I guess, but they seem to think it's a fairly accurate simulation with some funny bugs and missing parts. I hope that means they have a more complete, more realistic view in mind that they see instead of the shitty state it's in now, but each new update seems to add more ways to use your prisoners, more ways they can be bastards to you and each other, and more ways to 'control' them. The game provides so many more ways to treat your prisoners like the opponent rather than people to be helped or even people who need to be punished in the interest of justice. They're just faceless assholes at the moment.

And yeah, while it's not the only issue with the depiction, you totally have to pay to research the ability to provide medical care, and even then almost every player will do it to get the grant money from setting up basic medical services. That's true of visitation, psych care, drug treatment and other social aid too. It's just weird.

[Ninety-Three]

If you watch their videos that introduce each update it gets even more confusing. They're pretty bought in to their own simulation, which is a danger in that field I guess, but they seem to think it's a fairly accurate simulation with some funny bugs and missing parts. I hope that means they have a more complete, more realistic view in mind that they see instead of the shitty state it's in now, but each new update seems to add more ways to use your prisoners, more ways they can be bastards to you and each other, and more ways to 'control' them. The game provides so many more ways to treat your prisoners like the opponent rather than people to be helped or even people who need to be punished in the interest of justice. They're just faceless assholes at the moment.

 

And you're saying they haven't created a good thematic treatment of the prison-industrial complex?

 

I realize that's probably not really their intent, but I think there's something to be said for the style of a game like DEFCON, which presents its subject matter through mechanics, and leaves it to the player to realize "Holy shit, this is horrifying."

[tegan]

One of my favourite things ever is the legitimately endearing way that Japanese game devs are seemingly obsessed with making slight changes to the way they do things and then describing them as an entirely new system with its own ridiculous name, and I think that this one from Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters might be the best I've ever seen.

 

 

I love everything about it, from the fact that it's just Vanillaware-style animation under a new name to the fact that they really tried their damnedest to make an acronym out of it.

[syntheticgerbil]

I think that seems to work because during that whole Dragon's Crown debacle I remember reading some idiotic article that among other things claimed that Vanillaware somehow invented standard paperdoll type animation, or tweening if you love Flash. Macromedia also did not invent this digitally.

[neonrev]

And you're saying they haven't created a good thematic treatment of the prison-industrial complex?

 

I realize that's probably not really their intent, but I think there's something to be said for the style of a game like DEFCON, which presents its subject matter through mechanics, and leaves it to the player to realize "Holy shit, this is horrifying."

Nah, I'm saying they've put forth an image of trying to create a system where you can do different things with a prison in the interest of morality, but then made a game where you either simulate a gulag or a spend a while running a gulag while researching a reform camp. Real prisons actually do have accountability to laws regarding access to healthcare, visitation rights, access to reform and rehabilitation programs. In PA it's an upgrade so you can have more systems to manage, basically a self-chosen difficulty meter of complexity, and that's an even grosser depiction of how prisons work than reality. It doesn't even touch the real reasons prisons are horrible, it just acts like it does, and the world really really doesn't need anymore crappy examples of how the incarceration industry works.

That it's introversion, whose previous work exemplified theme through mechanics, making this game that is so clumsy at making a point it doesn't actually make is all the more bothersome. DEFCON was amazing, but it was representing death on a massive scale in a much colder and impersonal (An realistic, I'd say) way than PA does anything. Introversion makes great games when they focus on mechanics as a way to represent an experience, and seeing them screw up the theme (I think) of their first more visually polished and mainstream game is just saddening. 

[Gormongous]

That it's introversion, whose previous work exemplified theme through mechanics, making this game that is so clumsy at making a point it doesn't actually make is all the more bothersome. DEFCON was amazing, but it was representing death on a massive scale in a much colder and impersonal (An realistic, I'd say) way than PA does anything. Introversion makes great games when they focus on mechanics as a way to represent an experience, and seeing them screw up the theme (I think) of their first more visually polished and mainstream game is just saddening. 

 

They've said in multiple interviews that they're aware of the criticism about their game's thematic assumptions, but that they really just want to make a game that captures the feeling of how prisons operate in television and film. At this point, they appear to be making a deliberate choice not to deal with the moral gray areas surrounding prisons, like rehabilitation vs. incarceration (or retribution) and the effects of prison sentences on personality and criminal behavior. They've even said that they were hesitant to introduce more details to the prisoners, even for the sake of a better simulation, because they don't really want the player to feel obligated to keep those details in their head while playing.

 

They have a right to make whatever game they want, and a lot of Prison Architect looks and works really well, but I feel like they might be better off in the long run building a building/management sim that's not predicated on such a complex and unresolved issue. As it stands, the intro mission implies that the developers are interesting in doing a deep dive on it via the mechanics of their game, and as you and SBM say, that is emphatically not the case in the game itself.