Jake

Idle Thumbs 177: The Good Ones

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i think a formative part of my brain broke when we never got hoverboards. 

 

We sort of got the self lacing shoes from the movie.

 

nike_power_laces_hashslush4.jpg

 

... except for the self lacing part.

 

As cool as a hoverboard would be, I'd actually like that self adjusting, auto drying jacket.

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So, was anyone else screaming "ARTEMIS!" inside while we were listening about the mystery of where this female archer stereotype comes from? Just checking, going back to lurking now :)

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I didn't realize that Sunless Sea was Early Access, I was pretty much sold on buying it this weekend, but maybe I'll wait until it releases.

 

It's fairly functional for Early Access but I totally understand you wanting to hold off just because of the risks. I don't think Failbetter are really searching hard for the fun at this point or planning any more substantial systems (other than a combat revamp everyone said they needed to do); at the same time, that does mean that it'll be out in a few months anyway so you're not missing out.

 

I was really happy to hear the Sunless Seas has a non-binary option for gender; that's something I rarely, if ever, see in video games.

 

In Fallen London, their first game, your gender options are 'male', 'female', and 'my dear sir, there are individuals roaming the streets of Fallen London at this very moment with the faces of squid! Squid! Do you ask them their gender? And yet you waste our time asking me trifling and impertinent questions about mine? It is my own business, sir, and I bid you good day'. The last one takes up about half the page.

 

It's an opportunity for a great joke. It also inspired the Rubbery Men as a player race, which also allowed them to reflect Victorian racism without throwing any actual humans under the bus. Fallen London does support non-binary gender, somewhat clumsily - where gentlemen and ladies are referred to as 'sir' and 'madam', those of mysterious and indistinct gender inspire NPCs to stumble around for an appropriate honorific. The response they got to even that small bone encouraged them to support non-binary gender more completely in future projects. Sunless Sea asks you how you wish to be addressed, including non-gender specific options such as 'Captain' because of course you want to provide that option.

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My favorite part of that running stunt was my private joke that I hadn't even seen the movie I was referring to.

Chris 'Andy Kaufman' Remo.

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I only watched Back to the Future as (sort of) an adult, and I found the fact that Marty doesn't mind at all that his fucking up the past has changed his family almost beyond recognition somehow extremely sad. "I love my new successful and self-confident stranger family much better than the pathetic losers I had spent and the entirety of my life with."

 

That's probably the single most unsettling part of the movie for me. 

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I appreciate the cast members making fun of the terms "Roguelite" and "Roguelike," because they've always been terrible descriptions for the genre. It's a completely meaningless term if you aren't familiar with the mechanics of a specific Unix game from 35 years ago.

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I love time-travel as a science fiction story concept. Just love it. It's very difficult to do right, since either you have to set up rules and then abide by them, or you kind of hand-wave it and wink at the audience. I'm less inclined to like the latter case (I walked out of Looper real frustrated, but that movie is unsatisfying to me for many other reasons besides it's loosey goosey time travel), but in the former case you have to be real careful and not make a film that's only about the time travel.

 

I saw Primer just after it came out, based only some weird internet rumblings about the film. As a kid going to a nerdy engineering school at the time, it completely consumed me. The film is this perfect little 77 minute film that just dares you to rewatch it when it ends. The thing is, I hate that it's known as a "time travel" movie now, because ... well, I'll go into spoiler mode here:

 

Knowing that the film is a time travel film deflates the great scene in that film of the leads staring at a storage center only to see themselves walking by. And worse, it makes people care about the film for the wrong reasons. That film is currently thought of as a confusing film with a convoluted plot, and there are all kinds of websites devoted to decoding its twists. That's missing the point, to me. If you have the ability to travel through time, you have an insane amount of power, and the film is about trying to exercise that power and repeatedly failing. It's about trying very hard, about more importantly, control. Engineers and scientists have this intense desire to control chaotic variables. It's also about fucking over your friends, the essence of modern engineering! It's just so good. And when people reduce film, or literature, or theatre, to just a series of events that happen, they remove its power.

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Back to the Future (1) is one of those movies that as a kid I liked in part because it was part of this epic three part story, but at this point I much prefer to look at it as it was originally presented -- as a single film that had no plans for sequels or continuity or a universe or mythos or reason, and was concerned with being a thrilling and interesting story in and of itself, not how it slotted into a rule system.

 

I was going to be like "doesn't the movie end with a giant 'To Be Continued' graphic?" But then I looked it up and apparently that was only on the VHS release. Weird/gross. I agree that it's much better when taken on its own. The sequels feel pretty superfluous to me, though I do really enjoy all the rehashes of things that happened in the first movie with time period-appropriate twists.

 

I think the Bill and Ted movies actually do a better job handling the time travel. The way that they can basically solve every problem by just deciding that at some point later on after they win, they'll go back in time and set things up to help themselves is pretty goofy, but makes more sense than the weird fading-out-of-photographs stuff.

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I'm pretty sure I saw the Back to the Future movies at some point, but these days my association with them is Harlan Ellison hating on the first one (or two?) in his movie reviews and instead recommending Francis Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married as a much better take on similar themes. I was startled to learn that Coppola had even made a movie like that (I mean, how often do you hear about his movies other than the Godfathers, Apocalypse Now, and maybe The Conversation?), and ran out and rented it. And yeah, it's pretty fantastic. Complete with a really charmingly dorky young Nicholas Cage.

 

PS: Ellison's kind of a jerk, but his reviews were a great read. (As is pretty much everything the man writes, but I figure people probably know about his fiction.)

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I love time-travel as a science fiction story concept. Just love it. It's very difficult to do right, since either you have to set up rules and then abide by them, or you kind of hand-wave it and wink at the audience. I'm less inclined to like the latter case (I walked out of Looper real frustrated, but that movie is unsatisfying to me for many other reasons besides it's loosey goosey time travel), but in the former case you have to be real careful and not make a film that's only about the time travel.

 

I saw Primer just after it came out, based only some weird internet rumblings about the film. As a kid going to a nerdy engineering school at the time, it completely consumed me. The film is this perfect little 77 minute film that just dares you to rewatch it when it ends. The thing is, I hate that it's known as a "time travel" movie now, because ... well, I'll go into spoiler mode here:

 

Knowing that the film is a time travel film deflates the great scene in that film of the leads staring at a storage center only to see themselves walking by. And worse, it makes people care about the film for the wrong reasons. That film is currently thought of as a confusing film with a convoluted plot, and there are all kinds of websites devoted to decoding its twists. That's missing the point, to me. If you have the ability to travel through time, you have an insane amount of power, and the film is about trying to exercise that power and repeatedly failing. It's about trying very hard, about more importantly, control. Engineers and scientists have this intense desire to control chaotic variables. It's also about fucking over your friends, the essence of modern engineering! It's just so good. And when people reduce film, or literature, or theatre, to just a series of events that happen, they remove its power.

 

When I recommend Primer to people, I justify why it is so opaque on the first watch is because a major theme of the film is that there are some aspects about the fundamental workings of the Universe that simple ego-minded humans absolutely can not fathom, let alone try to exploit for their own means.

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I appreciate the cast members making fun of the terms "Roguelite" and "Roguelike," because they've always been terrible descriptions for the genre. It's a completely meaningless term if you aren't familiar with the mechanics of a specific Unix game from 35 years ago.

To be fair though I think someone looking from the outside in (on video games) would find a lot of terms to be as poorly descriptive by name alone. It could be argued that "FPS" and "RPG" mean nothing at face value unless you understand what the letters stand for, and then what those words together mean. Even "open-world" and "linear" would have to be explained, among others.

 

That said I'm sure there could be a better label for "this game doesn't really give you second chances and is hard as fuck." I wouldn't know what word to use though.

 

Also, LOMA > Lords Management.

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To be fair though I think someone looking from the outside in (on video games) would find a lot of terms to be as poorly descriptive by name alone. It could be argued that "FPS" and "RPG" mean nothing at face value unless you understand what the letters stand for, and then what those words together mean. Even "open-world" and "linear" would have to be explained, among others.

 

That said I'm sure there could be a better label for "this game doesn't really give you second chances and is hard as fuck." I wouldn't know what word to use though.

 

Also, LOMA > Lords Management.

 

"Role-playing game" still means absolutely nothing in and of itself. Playing a role is what you do in every game. "Role playing" is supposed to suggest more player freedom in defining that role, except that the term is also used to describe games that are fully linear with fully defined personalities, and the concept of "playing a role" outside of games overwhelmingly commonly refers to acting from a predefined script, not improvising a character.

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"Role-playing game" made more sense in reference to the dice and pencils variety. The electronic games which came along and adapted or took inspiration from things like D&D only used certain elements, and we ended up with all sorts of games that barely resembled each other, even early on. Look at Ultima, Wizardry and Final Fantasy. 

 

 

As someone who grew up playing D&D, I always felt that most computer RPGs missed the point of what made it special. It seemed weird that they would focus on the stat-based combat and turn structure, which were contrivances adopted to enable a simulation with nothing but paper, dice and pencils. If you have a computer doing the calculations and bookkeeping, you can do so much better! The interesting thing to me about RPGs was the shared experience of a group of people imagining a different world and inhabiting invented characters with boundless freedom. 

 

On the other hand, D&D in its early stages was entirely about fiddly tactical combat as an outgrowth of wargaming, so a lot of that ~theatre of the mind~ shit came later. That was a lot of words to basically say I agree with Chris that RPG as a term is pretty meaningless.

 

MUDs and early graphical MMOs were the closest to the traditional RPG experience. People really got into their roles, and the systems supported a wide variety of character types and interactions. I feel like we'll never see that again outside of small communities of weird people.

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"I tell ya, this neighborhood has really gone to hell since these Kongs came here.  Ya know, last night that Funky Kong drove past my house in some rocket-powered barrel that was so loud in damn near broke my windows.  It's just plain indecent, I tell ya.  And the banana peels!  They just leave their banana peels all over the -- oh, hey Diddy, I didn't see you there.  No, no, no, don't worry Diddy, I don't got a problem with you, you're one of the good ones."

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"Role-playing game" made more sense in reference to the dice and pencils variety

 

My point is that it still doesn't. It only makes sense because you understand its specific meaning, just like any other genre description. But in the English language generally, we also often say actors "play a role," and they are not defining a character the way one does in a pen and paper RPG, they are giving voice to a specific character whose personality and actions have been explicitly prescribed in advance.

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These days when I see "RPG" used to describe video games it's referring to a set of mechanics. And it isn't really a genre unto itself anymore, unless specifically prefixed with that all-important "J" in the front (which makes them more as Chris described). It's a supporting structure to games rather than the defining point. Taking the latest The Elder Scrolls games for example, they're 'open-world action-RPGs' (I'm basing that genre description on what most people I know tend to refer to the games as). The 'open-world' part being probably the most important point to describe why / how you experience the game, the 'action' defining the pace, and the 'RPG' being the support to all that.

 

Getting video games to the point of absolute free-form expression on the player's part is... quite the undertaking. There's always boundaries. Dialog is probably one of the biggest hurdles to overcome (and now I'm remembering that guy Chris mentioned years ago on IT that was trying to make a procedural dialog generation system; whatever happened to that?). Tabletop games have rules dictating the mechanics of how you do things, but that's it. There's few restrictions in the way of what you're allowed to do, let alone why. It's all about your dungeon / game master being able to adjust. They're really superior in that way.

 

Another post ending note: "Genre" is a bad term for describing what kind of video game video games are, too. All of the rhetoric involved with video games is wrong.

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My point is that it still doesn't. It only makes sense because you understand its specific meaning, just like any other genre description. But in the English language generally, we also often say actors "play a role," and they are not defining a character the way one does in a pen and paper RPG, they are giving voice to a specific character whose personality and actions have been explicitly prescribed in advance.

 

The funny thing is, a lot of indie RPGs that have come out in the last decade as the online market for .pdfs has become a reality are much closer to a literal definition of "role-playing games" than those that were around when the term first started being used. Dogs in the VineyardBliss Stage, and Engine Heart are just three I've read that are almost entirely cooperative storytelling engines with group-created characters in which dice are used only when two players disagree about the direction of the plot or when they agree that randomness is the most interesting way to resolve a task. But the majority of people still play D&D and the term "role-playing game" has drifted so far from a literal meaning that people accuse heavily narrativist games as "not being RPGs."

 

Video games! Pen-and-paper games!

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