Jake

Idle Thumbs 171: The Curious Case of the Rhode Island Reader

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Regarding the discussion about playing a character that acted in unpredictable ways, didn't L.A. Noire have something like that where your detective would sometimes react not how you'd expect during interviews? I haven't played it myself, but seem to remember hearing/reading that about it.

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I think the reason Kentucky Route Zero feels so big is that with all the tiny choices along that linear ride, you're not really given the chance to peek behind the curtain at any point, so the possibilty space FEELS like any series of choices could lead to anything, but that game is probably going to have one ending, not 100.

 

I agree with this! That your choice of dialog doesn't seem to impact much makes KRZ feel so good, and weirdly makes the story more personal. It's more an expression of your feeling than a choice. I always talk to the dog, rather than just say "take it easy." 

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I am saying, quite literally, that we took flack for choices "not mattering" unless they butterfly-effected out as far as possible. 

 

Verbatim "my choice to save Duck didn't matter because Shawn was just going to die anyway." That is my problem -- because that's absurd.  A choice matters because you make it at the cost of something else, not because it has a clear consequence -- which is my design philosophy. A philosophy, I should point out, that in no way takes umbrage with games (say, like Civ) where early choices ripple out in incredible ways. That's fine. But I take strong issue with "my choice didn't matter because,".  

 

If you want to make and play and prefer choose your own adventures, that's awesome. Great. I'm sure I'd love the good ones and prefer them to a bad thing that is less explicit in its branches.

 

Also, it's worth considering what is a branching narrative?  If you play a narrative game that isn't explicitly about altering the timeline then you are experiencing a linear narrative.  The only reason the story in the Last of Us is different than a Walking Dead playthrough -- when it comes to what the characters are doing and saying on screen -- is that there are no explicit mechanics inside of the Last of Us that highlight the fact that the story could change.  It's a movie (I mean a linear story) and you play the action scenes. Nevertheless, if you edited together a Walking Dead play-through and stripped out all of UI so it was just the characters doing things, how different would it be? You would still be devouring a linear story but playing something that you knew was branching (which is what makes the game interesting and for us, worth making).  Making a choice when the outcome never comes home to roost IS interesting.  "Why did I say that to her? She just stormed away. Would she have stormed away anyway? Is it because she's upset about something else? Shit, should I've said something nice? Could I have? I don't remember. Shit... to hell with it, I made my choice."  If you give players a choice and they experience a non-obvious outcome players will actually consider inside of the fiction why that happened. Not what number flipped to make them succeed or fail but, (holy shit!) how a fictional character experienced and interpreted their action. Now the player is empathizing. And as a designer? Hell yeah, she walks away no matter what. It's way cheaper to build and we have a lot of game left to make.

 

The assertion that a choice in a game is not a choice unless it has an obvious on-screen outcome is juvenile and frankly, not one I pay much attention to.

 

I have to chime in on this as well. The issue is more nuanced than infinite branching (which is obviously absurd) vs no branching.

When you design a game and decide to give the player an explicit choice, you want them to believe that choice reflects some kind of agency in the narrative, because the opposite of that is apathy. To maintain that belief you need the story to branch just enough, and downplay the parts where it doesn't. In the case of the example from TWD you mentioned the game draws attention to the fact that you didn't have any agency in that situation.

 

Another point is that TWD intentionally places itself in the contex of other games that are more concerned with branching narrative, and that creates player expectations. I played TWD with my sister who doesn't play that many games, but whose favourites include Deus Ex and Mass Effect. In Episode 3 when the argument at the van happened, and a certain person ate it she instinctively quit the game to replay the conversation. And then again and again until she realised the outcome was fixed. Needless to say the spell was broken at that point. Maybe it's playing the game wrong (I don't like that phrase), but it also feels like the game breaking a promise to the player.

 

Would I rather have no choice at all? No, I think having lots of largely insignificant choices (see Mass Effect) is a great thing. I don't want to tell Garrus he's an idiot it would make me feel bad, even though I know it won't affect the plot. That's what I think you're getting at, but that all starts to come apart when the game tells you what the stakes are. My relationship with Garrus exists in my head; a life and death situation exists on the screen and when you ask me to make a choice about what's on the screen you should show the consequences on the screen too.

 

Finally, whether you want it to or not, suggesting that the player has agency and then consistenty going back on it is making a comment on (the lack of) that agency. If I wanted to make a game about apathy, I'd make a game where you're put in tense situations, forced to make a choice and where the outcome never changes. Apathy might be appropriate in the zombie apocalypse but I don't think it was the intended message of TWD.

 

edit: I write very slowly so sorry if someone else already made the same points.

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Regarding the discussion about playing a character that acted in unpredictable ways, didn't L.A. Noire have something like that where your detective would sometimes react not how you'd expect during interviews? I haven't played it myself, but seem to remember hearing/reading that about it.

 

I'm glad you mentioned this because most of the criticism I have heard about the Gods Will Be Watching is similar to this criticism people had for L.A. Noire, and I think that dovetails into why the game gets criticized for its difficulty -- not because the difficulty isn't thematically appropriate, but more because for some people it's not intuitive at all trying to determine how characters are reacting, and what sort of impact your actions will have in the underlying systems. Thorny design problem there.

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P.S. As a swede the conversation about being "hot-livered" was amusing. It seems like it's a term in english too though, at least according to wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hot-livered).

 

Welcome!

 

That wikitionary article points out that the term is archaic, meaning it sounds very dated to English speakers. I can definitely imagine an outraged English speaker in the 19th century describing himself or herself as "hot-livered".

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Welcome!

 

That wikitionary article points out that the term is archaic, meaning it sounds very dated to English speakers. I can definitely imagine an outraged English speaker in the 19th century describing himself or herself as "hot-livered".

 

Ah. I missed that. I guess that's what I get for just skimming the page and then linking it. That changes the tone of the reader letter a bit if you ignore the swedish connection.

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Epic smoke orb

 

That's way too much movement for a mass. Maximum movement is the priest lifting the goblet half a meter, anything more and people have trouble following the movement. Only one thing can move at a time and only for small motions. The smoke orb is carried so it moves as little as possible and when it's dispensing smoke, its entourage must be as still as possible. 

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I wonder if anyone has ever been taken out by that thing?

I wonder if they also have a giant sized ice cream scoop water flinger, you know, to continue with the "giant church shit" theme, or perhaps they just chuck whole buckets of holy water over the congregation

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Holy shit I've never seen one move that much.

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I like how Smoke Orb has become instantly Thumbs'd in the cast and in this thread. As a non-Christian, I am fascinated by how Christians perceive their own religion (well, how everyone perceives their own religion but Christians are in the highest supply around here).

 

I both admire Jake's restraint and am disappointed in the same and we got no "poopoo kazoo" which I was hotly anticipating.

 

I LOVE CLUE. This may be the only buzzfeed article I ever link to anyone. It is not a list, it is not gifs. It is the awesome oral history of Clue.

 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/something-terrible-has-happened-here-the-crazy-story-of-how#34d3nd4

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I like that the other name for a censer is a thurible, which is how Daffy Duck would say "terrible."

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I first learned that a smoke orb was called a censer in Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven.  And not from reading it, from watching the Simpsons version of it.

I never thought about it before, but that's almost certainly how I learned it as well

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A game where the main character is an enigma with ever escalating weirdness: Killer 7. That game is bad in a lot of ways, but it's also great in a lot of others.

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"That was when I saw the Pendulum."

 

?

 

 

?

 

Re: choice in The Walking Dead, Failbetter literally just posted this quote to their blog (?) that I think underlies a lot of the issues people had:

“My subjective experience is living is one of having continually to make a choice between given alternatives, and it is this experience of doubt and temptation which seems more important and memorable to me then the actions I take when I have made my choice.”

 

I remember talking with the producer for Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and he mentioned that in that game they were trying to create moments of rising and falling tension with the Underworld segments, which worked for most people. Some players, though, worked out that there were never any monsters in the real-world segments, and thus there was no danger, thus they could do what they liked. Doesn't matter that the tension is supposed to be waiting for the Underworld to appear, because it'll only appear once they hit the appropriate trigger.

 

I think The Walking Dead had a similar problem: for players who ignore the story and try and work out what the effects of their actions are, it becomes clear that there's no point agonising over any of the choices because no matter what they choose, stuff will happen and they'll get the best ending. To them, there's no such thing as a right choice, so why care?

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A game where the main character is an enigma with ever escalating weirdness: Killer 7. That game is bad in a lot of ways, but it's also great in a lot of others.

Nice pull. Lee in TWD: Episode 1 fit that character separation example for me when he goes to his family's drug store and is poring over the clippings and memorabilia while I thought it was just a random location. Walker from Spec Ops might also count for his refusal to retreat or negotiate with allied troops.

 

Most other occasions of a character acting atypically and confusing me that I can think of are just examples of bad writing.

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When the phrase "you know what you could do with that *********?" was uttered, all I could think of was the not-to-so-popular Australian saying "to be hit with the wrong end of a *********". Not really sure whether I'm secretly wishing for thumb-on-thumb violence by fruit, but there you have it.

 

Edit: Anyone want to explain why the word p i n e a p p l e is being replaced?

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Edit: Anyone want to explain why the word ********* is being replaced?

Because we don't hold with that kind of offensive language here. You shouldn't bypass the filter to inflict your vulgarity on the other posters :(

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I'm a bit disappointed that Chris doesn't censor "*********" in the podcast as well.

 

Also, Clue is amazingly entertaining movie. I have watched it three times in less than a year, I think.

 

 

?

 

The swinging smoke orb in the video reminded me of a scene in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.

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