Sticking Forks into People

The most asked question since the invention of the cellphone: where are you?

I see the utility in the technology, though I do hate when someone in point-blank range rapid fires inanity into their phone. “WHERE ARE YOU? I’M ON THE BUS TOO. DID YOU GET MY TEXT? YEAH THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT ALSO. YEAH SEE YOU IN A FEW MINUTES.” For a blast of silence, I recommend Shure earphones.

Games can be annoying also; multiple loading screens, laggy menu controls, explodable barrels. Imagine a mobile game that, every time you lost, your phone calls you and says you suck, and the game will only allow you to play again if you answer the call. No, I wouldn’t want to play Put Your Balls in a Vice either, but since we’re already being absurd, there’s no point in being sane now.

Let’s imagine a game that did have a Game Over screen not nearly as outrageous as the one above but had some element that annoyed you; perhaps the sound of your character dying makes you feel like you’ve been kidney punched; perhaps the sequence of flashing lights makes your eyes want to vomit. What if despite these factors, you still liked the game, that the Game Over screen is the only bothersome part? What if you continued playing and realized you aren’t trying to “beat” the game and instead are trying to avoid that infuriating you’re dead screen? The motivation isn’t inspiring, but the result might be that you become a better player at the game.

And if this becomes a style, the most common game expression will be “I hate you.”

Something to think about: Is there such a thing as a well-made, balanced game that isn’t fun?

...Red Fish, Blue Fish

This rainbow is illiterate.

A comment from last week said it’d be cool to know what we think is important or interesting to read when it comes to our jobs. Now, I’m the kind of person who could make a pretty badass fort out of my collection - well, half of one; a stack of trade paperbacks is structurally weak - so my answer is gonna be read everything, but there is much more to it. Hold on a sec while I don my smoking jacket and pat my clown nose.

There is an idea that once we find our place career-wise, we should take in all the books that relate to our job title. Reasonable - you read theories and then make sense of them through application. I’d rather superficially know a couple dozen books spread across all genres instead of being intimate with a handful from one. There is the intelligence of someone who knows their discipline through and through, and there is the person who doesn’t know the sub-atomics of a subject but can use a jack of al trades knowledge to draw parallels from various sources.

For example, in a Gamers With Jobs podcast, guest Shawn Elliott talks about the different AI types in Gears of War 2. It’s a typical game element most gamers are somewhat aware of but don’t have the eloquence and articulation of Mr. Elliott, and then seemingly out of nowhere, he compares the gameplay to a hummingbird’s dietary needs and how this itself is like a lock-and-key scenario where every baddie can be handled by utilizing a particular weapon set against each type. Clearly he wouldn’t have been able to draw comparisons just by reading books and articles on games.

It’s all about understanding the behavior of things, to see if relationships from different subjects are puzzle pieces that can fit together to form new shapes with weight and depth. It’s not insta-smartification; just another way of thinking and articulating a point, ideally an original one. Don’t count yourself with the sheep. It will only make your audience fall asleep.

It’s a tough mindset to get into - I thank my family for pushing me into this mode. My mother wasn’t much for book-reading herself, but when I was a kid she gave me a subscription to some readers book club. As I got older I remember my older brother reading a lot, and since I thought everything he did was cool, I copied him.

How did my father contribute? Well, I remember this one time when he beat me with a rolled up newspaper.

Something to read about: What books made you say, “hot damn that’s interesting”? We should all be on the lookout for good reads. I’ll put my list in the comments so that it doesn’t look like we read tumbleweeds.

This Unicorn Is Named Stretch

“What’s wrong?”
“I gotta babysit my little sister tonight. How bout you? You don’t look happy.”
“I just beat the sewer level, and now I have to do an escort mission.”
“Ouch. And I thought I had it bad.”

Gamers hate escort missions. We really do. From X-wing to Goldeneye to Bioshock, escort missions are the equivalent of the absent-minded dentist drilling into your face before giving you a shot of novocaine.

Well, I should quantify that statement - the gamer one, not the doc-these-tears-are-real one. Most hate this mechanic because the person/object you have to escort is equipped with moron AI; poor path-finding, an inability to distinguish between walking down a hall and walking into gunfire. They have to be watched every single step of the way. They are babies, minus the cute factor.

Well, some babies are cute.

In the world of science - where magic takes place - there are two ideas called the Availability Heuristic and the Affect Heuristic - or what Daniel Gardner in his book The Science of Fear calls the Example Rule and Good-Bad Rule, respectively. Example Rule states “the easier it is to recall examples of something, the more common that something must be or the more common they judge that thing to be.” The Good-Bad Rule states “when faced with something, Gut [unconscious thought] may instantly experience a raw feeling that something is good or bad.”

In the world of non-scientific polling - where you can make all the correlations you want - I’ve found that the majority of people who don’t mind escort missions are the ones who either game as a mere distraction or have started gaming within the last generation. For the rest of us gamers going all Wrath of Khan, Good-Bad tells us escort missions feel more like work than fun. Example tells us this is an epidemic because every other game since the beginning of the dinosaurs has an escort-type mission and only every other one of these is barely tolerable.

So no more escort missions please.

Something to think about: What are some other gameplay mechanics you can do without? Cuz I’ve got a ton.

I Wear a Smoking Jacket When I Game. And Post

Shown: cucumber sandwich. Not Shown: Algernon Moncrieff

Is there such a thing as a pretentious game? I’m sure all of us can name a pretentious film or novel or piece of music, but at the moment I’m coming up with blanks for games. Even Bioshock, a game famous for its Producer and story built around Objectivism, I wouldn’t consider it to be flaunting self-importance. I vaguely remember reading somewhere in a forum that applied the teleological suspension of the ethical to Shadow of the Colossus. Heck, even the name Kierkegaard conjures images of Victorians eating cucumber sandwiches while sitting cross-legged, complaining about the insensibility of the lower class and their meat sandwiches.

Perhaps it’s the interactive element that prevents pomposity in games from the outset - I think even without watching, say, American Beauty, you can tell by the poster or trailer that this movie is flowery. But what is it about this interactivity? Is it because games are designed for play, maximum funinosity? But then what about polo, where players ride horses and swings mallets? Knights these players are not. Fancy leg guards and silly hats with neck straps equals more tea, guvnor.

Perhaps it’s the subject matter and setting. The games that tend to emit self-importance usually trip and impale themselves on their gunswords. No, I didn’t forget the /. When a movie or book self-inflates, we usually roll our eyes or think nothing of it. If a game tries to do the same thing, we tend to be more lenient because, in the end, all we’re really doing is playing with toys; instead of actually holding the action figures, we’re using a 20-button controller or mouse and keyboard to bash the heroes and villains into each other. Actually, this could be a reason to doubly roll our eyes. “Good lord, this game drops as many philosophical ideas as I’m dropping space goblins.”

Or perhaps it has to do with the box covers - though not nearly as garish as comic book ones. Look at box descriptors and you’ll find gems like “impactful slow motion gun battles!” All the cucumber sandwiches in the world couldn’t stop a bullet point like that.

Something to think about: would pretentious games be such a bad thing to have?

The Perilous Adventures of Shampoo and Conditioner

While coming out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, I saw a billboard for Valve’s Left 4 Dead, a zombie apocalypse shooter, and ads for Bethesda’s Fallout 3 on the side of 3 buses. People probably think these are big-budget, high-profile games, which they are and in the latter game’s case, one of the voice actors is Liam Neeson.

Games have become an interactive Hollywood, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; bigger pushes for storytelling, bigger pushes for cinematic flair to go with high-production polish. And while I enjoy games taking the flashy elements of the movies, they should take the opportunity to borrow something else like manipulation and conditioning.

To an extent games already do these; players open treasure chests for loot yet also expect the occasional booby trap; players have learned to look before jumping over chasms because getting struck in midair usually results in falling into the darkness. These are universal. But what if game designers used these normative behaviors against the player? What if you the player were told to “come by after closing so I can give you your reward,” and when you return, you get robbed of all your possessions? What if you spotted a lone tower on the plains, and after fighting your way to the top, you find nothing of value?

The thing with most game conditioning is if players know they have to work hard for something, then they expect rewards. If we were to break this conditioning, introduce a new one that greatly increased consequence, then players will apply more thought into their decisions. “I could attack this fort, but what if I use up more resources than I replenish?”

Most games treat dilemmas like they treat their ethical binaries: both paths have different but equally valuable rewards.

Something to Think about: Conditioning doesn’t have to be isolated to gameplay. Like movies, think about how game designers could manipulate the players through the narrative.