Sports: The Comparisons

I love my Sunday gaming group to death, but it’s established that I can’t watch sports with them. I turned off the Super Bowl one year because they were MST3K’ing it. One of them rooted against the Giants, because a World Series win would mean traffic during the parade.

So for them, and any other gamers who don’t understand why we spend so much time discussing who will football the hardest, here’s why sports is great on a societal level. I’ve even written it out in geek-friendly metaphors, because I live in the center of the Venn diagram of Sports Fan + Total Nerd. My friends, just imagine that…


… Every single person in my city cheers for the Browncoats. That guy on the bus has an opinion on whether Wayne Coyne is getting too old to play with The Flaming Lips. During the postseason, every day is PAX, and everyone is cosplaying.

… Your grandma watched STK win. Your dad taught you how to zergling rush. Your mom gave you orange slices while you were writing your first fanfic, and your uncle helped you edit it.

… The boss talks about going into teamfight mode when he schedules overtime. Everyone can sympathize when the wife throws away PC Gaming’s swimsuit issue. Simon and Garfunkel sang “Where have you gone, Peter Molyneux, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you?”


This is what it’s like to be a sports fan in a nation of sports fans. Sports is great because we've all agreed to care so much about something that doesn't matter.


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(No, I don’t think sports are a necessary part of everyone’s lives. What I’m doing here is poking fun a little, but also showing how having an entire society agree to care about something makes it easier to reach out to people, making common ground to break the ice. I wrote a blog post once with a similar premise.)

(It doesn’t matter that it’s sports, necessarily. It could just as easily be anything else, but our society decided it should be sports. You can see similar effects within a fandom, or when a television event like the Red Wedding or the Breaking Bad finale happens. The only difference between sports and those is that so many people have already bought into sports.)

Bleem!, the Ruin of Hopes and Dreams

Once, long ago, Bleem! was my gaming platform.

When I was growing up, a console on the TV was verboten: My parents reasoned that someone would need the TV, and my dad was game-savvy enough to know it would suck to get kicked off mid-session. We kept an eye out for a small, cheap PC monitor with VGA ports for a console, but never found one.

Instead, the PC became my gaming platform... though not for PC games. I started emulating, primarily ZSNES. Looking back at it, it's amazing how janky some of the emulation was. I played through most of Super Mario RPG without being able to use the controls to throw more fireballs. I mapped out most of the future-world dome in Chrono Trigger, because the fog layer blocked off everything else. Granted, a cousin of mine helped me fix that (for which he is forever a god), but I was stuck for months.

All of those errors pale before Bleem!, though. Frankly, the fact that Bleem! never made me destroy my computer is amazing.

Bleem! was a Playstation emulator for PCs, sold in stores, back when the Playstation was still pretty new. This was my current-gen gaming system. And to put in perspective how much of a treat it was, when I first bought Bleem!, it didn't even run on our main PC. The only computer that could run it was my dad's work laptop, which he only brought home occasionally.

So imagine a Friday. Your dad comes home, smiling as he hands you the laptop, you start up Bleem!, you pop in Star Ocean II, you play for an hour and a half... and it doesn't save. Saving just didn't work in Bleem! for this game. I played through the first hour of that game like five times, and I had wild plans to leave the laptop running between sessions. (... for all 60 hours? This was a JRPG in the late 90s, after all.)

Chrono Cross had the same issue, which was a heartbreaker. I was a huge Chrono Trigger fan after I finally got the emulator to work. Chrono Trigger may be the first JRPG, other than Pokémon, that I actually beat, and I got hooked on a fanfic that carried on the plot. Chrono Cross was even the first game I really disagreed with my parents on -- me, quiet and rule-abiding Matthew, playing a game with 3D attacks. The violence of it all! And yet, saving was broken in Bleem!, so that was that.

The worst, though, was definitely Lunar. Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete was my favorite game until I played FFVII, two or three years later. It established my taste for anime cut scenes, it had a grand plot with love and destiny, the songs are still stuck in my head, and it had a flying cat. Seriously, the localization team actually shelled out to make cut scene songs good in English! And the saves worked.

You know what didn't work, though? At the very end of a 40+ hour JRPG? After the Big Bad walked up the staircase of the Goddess tower, challenging you to follow him? The second to last battle.

(Closing thought: Does anyone else remember, back when we were only allowed to game for an hour a day, waking up early so you could play first thing in the morning? I remember Escape Velocity: Override sessions that started Friday night, then finished with an hour on Saturday morning.)

My gaming kryptonite, and the interesting implications thereof

So, I'm going to lay bare a piece of Unfortunate Gaming Truths. There's a type of game that's like crack to me, the kind of game that lures me in for just one round at eight o' clock, then I stumble home exhausted at two in the morning. When anyone asks where I've been, I stammer "The office."

My most recent gaming mistress is Card Hunter, but there's a storied lineage stretching back to Civ5, League, and TF2. What's interesting here is that these games aren't the games I want to play: My ideal games have wildly original gameplay, an immersive story or theme, or are otherwise semi-pretentious art or indie games.

Which brings me to a realization about the games that own my soul: They don't give me what I think I want, they don't give me the real experience. I get hooked on games most because of how I experience them, not how they actually are.

To put this a different way, these games could be the Matrix, or Plato's shadow puppets. Things like Civ5's early gameplay are a perfect example: I'm not actually tactically engaged, I'm playing mostly by muscle memory. I've got a bandit camp nearby, so do this, or I'm on an island, so do that. I get the satisfaction of thinking that I'm smart, but all I've done is trot out non-complex solutions to the same problem. This lets me stay in a hazed, tuned-out relaxation mode, but still feel challenged.

Compare that to games that are actually tactical. Transitioning to the mid-game in Civ5 adds layers of complexity, and I rarely end up thinking too deeply about how to win a game of League. If I have to start thinking like that, it calls up a different part of my brain, and makes me sit up and pay attention. So much for the high, it's time to sober up.

Even though I'm more engaged with that kind of challenging gameplay, it's not as fun or relaxing, so I shy away from those games. So what's important, then, isn't that I'm challenged -- it's that I think I'm being challenged. In fact, because I (like most people) like to fill bars and complete milestones, it's actually better for a game to fake-challenging than to actually put up a fight.

In another case, most of the games that hate to see me alone on a night like this are round-based PvP. Here again, perception is key, almost like a Turing test. I found myself quitting out of a Card Hunters arena match because it was against a computer, rather than PvP. My issue was not anything to do with playing a computer, because AI is so good I can't tell the difference. I wasn't looking at chat for conversation. It was exclusively the knowledge that I wasn't playing against another person, which made the game feel less worthy.

The trick being, AI opponents can provide a much better experience, especially if they're programmed with the above point in mind, that the perception of challenge is better than actual challenge. An AI opponent can throw the match at just the right time, or ramp up difficulty to match your play. With an AI opponent, the game designer can build exactly the narrative that makes a player want to keep playing. We still match players versus players, but I can't see any reason to have to do this, and plenty of benefits to having PvE masquerade as PvP.

I'm not going to advocate for us all to unshackle ourselves from staring at the wall of Plato's cave, or demand that game devs not manipulate our gaming experiences. AIs would be a damned sight better than dealing with some League players, for one thing, and a grand strategy game with adaptive difficulty would be brilliant.

What I will say, though, is that those of us who want gaming to push its limits as an art form should be playing games that way. Don't just go through the motions, don't get a seven-round itch. If you want to play something genuinely fresh and challenging, make sure you're both playing games that reward that, and that you're playing those games in that way. Don't go looking for a top-tier game experience while you're mentally checked out.

If you just want to relax or hang out with friends, though, embrace that. If I could have a Smash64 opponent right now that played as well as a human being, it wouldn't matter if they were actually a computer, so long as I never found out. Figure out how you'll have the most fun, then take that design philosophy into the dev studio. We can nudge players in 4X games without making the game completely linear, give them the experience that's most fun.

What's Matthew Listening To?

I may not be a real audiophile, but I have been listening to some good music -- and at the risk of being a hipster, you probably haven't heard of some of it. Which is a shame, because it's worth a listen. Page through, maybe you'll find something new and interesting.

Warning: I listen to NSFW music, and some of the titles ain't clean. Avert your eyes, children and actual adults.

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"Cum Junkie," by Genitorturers. Pop-rock with a catchy chorus that you can never, ever sing in public.

"Wu-Tang Clan Aint Nuthing Ta F' Wit," by Wu-Tang Clan. All you need is to listen to the hook, so you can quote and paraphrase it without feeling like a complete poser.

"Nobody Likes You (When You're Dead)," by Zombina and the Skeletones. Pop-punk about the loneliness of an undead girl. Smart rhymes and an upbeat organ/synth make this a fun parody of both B movies and middle-class culture.

"Hey Baby," by Deadmau5 and Melleefresh. I've heard it described as "for horny nerds," mashing up Deadmau5's expansive, sparse sound with alternating squeaky and gravelly bad-girl vocals. I usually listen to it in the same session as "Le Disko," and the pulsing bass is good for zone-out gaming; it's served me well playing FPSes.

"Tough Guy," by Celldeweller. Celldweller's somewhere between a rock band and a dubstep act, and if you took the structure of late-radio heavy metal, but replaced the solos with heavy drops, you wouldn't be far off from Celldweller. The drops are very Skrillex-y, very heavy and dirty.

"Invaders Must Die," by The Prodigy. They're probably closest to Pendulum in sound, serious drum 'n' bass with heavy distortion. This track goes very abruptly from slow to manic, so be prepared for violent drops.

Memento Mori by The Bastard Fairies. If a burlesque group moonlit as an indie band doing the soundtrack for a coming-of-age story, they'd be The Bastard Fairies. They've got acoustic guitars, airy vocals where you can hear every breath, and samples from 50's era PSAs. Fair warning, their sound changes between Memento Mori and their more recent releases; still good, but less cabaret-ish.

"Clarity" by Zedd and Foxes, "Wake Me Up" by Avicii, "I Need Your Love" by Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding. Pop-techno, you've heard it on the radio, you don't need me to describe it to you.

Immersion and "Witchcraft" by Pendulum. I latched onto Pendulum's "Blood Sugar" back in college, and hearing their new style is a dramatic change. (Or maybe "Blood Sugar" just wasn't representative of their style.) These tracks are more storybook and heroic/romantic, but still drum 'n' bass. The cover art of Immersion gives the right feel of musical fantasy: Two nude swimmers, in dark water with a spotlight ray of light, surrounded by a reef and fish.

"Crystallize" and "Elements," by Lindsey Stirling. Apparently everyone else has already listened to this, but I just discovered it. Violin played over dubstep; it's awesome. This is more like European dubstep, with slow, rolling drops, and less thudding bass and more in the higher registers.

The Special Hells: Bringing a Knife to a Flamewar

The worst thing you can ever do is personally piss off a community manager. Maybe your account is permabanned, or you’re given a temp ban from the forums. But if you’ve been riding the line – if the CM can’t quite justify banning you, but you’ve genuinely made an enemy of them – if they have to get creative to deal with you?

Then, my friend, welcome to the special hells.

(Note: This is going to be a list of vBulletin-focused techniques for dealing with problem players. I haven’t worked with other forum backends, but there may be ways to replicate the effects. Also, our version of vBulletin is very customized, so there may be differences from your own versions.)

Important links:

Forums and Moderators -> Forum Permissions

Usergroups -> Usergroup Manager

Tachy Goes to Coventry

This is the classic, the battle-hardened veteran of dealing with spammers and alt accounts alike. When banning someone would just get them to make a new account – whether the user is spamming, or just angry enough to keep registering new free accounts – Tachy is the answer. By adding them to the Tachy list, they’re added to everyone’s Ignore lists.

From the player’s perspective, they’re still posting threads, still replying, etc. All anyone else will see, though, is “The admins decided that X should be quiet for a while.” This applies to their old posts as well, which is a mixed blessing.

If you want, you can remove them from Coventry after they’ve calmed down, but unlike banning them, they’ve lost time to figuring out what happened. It takes a surprisingly long time for them to realize this, often a couple days.

(Fun fact: Facebook uses a version of Coventry in comment moderation. If you Hide a comment, at least in the Page framework, it can still be seen by them and their friends.)

Change the title of the Banned usergroup

For vBulletin, the way banning someone works is that it switches their usergroup to a usergroup with the Banned characteristic. First off, that means you can make more Banned usergroups with different permissions, allowing you to create different degrees of banning; second, since Banned is a usergroup, you can customize it. You can hide it.

Say you’ve got a popular user you need to temp-ban. If his friends see that he’s banned, they’ll rise up in revolt. Usually, the giveaway is the user title: While he’s banned, his title will say as much. You can open up the usergroup and hide that, though, changing the Banned group’s default title to be the same as their pre-ban title.

(If your Banned usergroup has other giveaways, like different avatar permissions, copy your main Registered Users group, and just scroll down and set it as a Banned group.)

“You can’t see the PvP forums? However could this have happened?!”

Some players are good and helpful through most of the forums, but when they get on one particular track, they turn into a Dire Ragemonster (challenge rating 7). Simple: Keep them out of that forum.

vBulletin lets you customize accessing and viewing forums according to their usergroup. This is the same tech that lets you make hidden Moderator Forums. Presto-changeo, now they can’t even see the discussion that was getting them riled up, or they can read it but not comment on it.

(This isn’t usually something that can be set player-by-player. You’ll probably want to set up a new usergroup that doesn’t have access to those forums.)

Changing permissions

This one’s less subtle, but it can give you a way to directly curb a bad behavior without having to ban someone. The ability to have a signature, and what can be included in it, is determined by the usergroup.

You can also change their image permissions, and how long their posts can be. This has to be altered per usergroup per forum, though, so it can take a while to set up usegroups with these permissions changed globally. Alternatively, if an entire board is a problem – generally PvP forums – change it so no usergroup can post images or gifs.­

The banhammer isn’t your only weapon, fellow CMs. Know your tools and get creative, because sometimes it’s a lot better to use something tricky than just banning them. Maybe you can give a player a second chance by only removing some permissions, or maybe you keep a spammer from realizing he’s effectively banned – either way, keep these subtle moves in mind.

Gaming: The Year So Far

We’re nine months in, so it’s a good time to look at the year so far. We haven’t seen many structural changes, like the explosion of Kickstarters last year, but that doesn’t mean it’s been a boring nine months. Read on, and let me know in the comments if you think I missed something.

No one spoils BioShock Infinite’s ending…

Infinite was always going to be a blockbuster, and it was always going to have a game-changer ending. This was never in doubt. It was far from guaranteed that it would be this spectacular, though, and much credit goes to the producers who finally pushed that game out the door. Infinite in March was the first Game of the Year contender, and all the pent-up excitement from years of teasers exploded in cosplay, art and ending discussions.

Oddly, though, this generally didn’t end up spoiling the ending. There was a lot of discussion that there was an ending, and that it would leave you reeling, but not the specifics or spoilers. The media was generally on-point, as well, pointing towards Booker, Elizabeth and their relationship as the most important part, rather than the world they were in.

… or the ending of The Last of Us, either

Plot spoilers weren’t discussed publicly for Infinite, but the mechanics could be debated, and companion AI immediately became a major conversation. In June, Elizabeth was followed by Ellie, and it felt like Infinite all over again. Both games had mechanical similarities, featured an AI companion designed to be appreciated, and had Troy Baker voicing the protagonist.

With all those similarities, the only major difference was that Infinite was more of a cultural phenomenon: Elizabeth and Columbia made for better fan art and cosplay. I’ll be interested to hear the comparisons between these two from a business side. Two art games wrapped in an FPS shell, received with high accolade from the press – but one got a titanic marketing campaign, and another relied mostly on word of mouth. Profit comparisons would be fascinating for these.

(Point of interest: I’ve heard that Elizabeth’s role was actually modeled after Ellie. The story goes that the Infinite team had originally designed Elizabeth closer to the traditional model of a companion, then after watching a Last demo, realized Elizabeth’s mechanics had to change.)

Subscription MMOs still get made

Sure, it makes a degree of sense, but I never guessed that both ESO and WildStar would be subscription-based. We’ve been heralding the demise of the subscription for a while, and now even WoW is considering going F2P; ESO and WildStar might be the last chance for subscription to remain the default option.

Growing pains in the industry

Much like last year, this year’s seen a lot of moments where the gaming industry confronted glaring failures in including women in the community. From Dickwolves getting dredged back up at PAX to the videos of Tropes vs Women in Video Games, this year’s had plenty of headlines about this. Unfortunately, judging by how each flashpoint’s occurred, it doesn’t seem that much has changed: Each flashpoint treads the same ground, without the vocal arguers on each side changing at all.

Interestingly, this year’s marked a couple of shifts in the way we discuss diversity in gaming. In years past, the diversity discussion centered around having female and non-white protagonists; now it seems more focused around how good female characters are, and how we treat female gamers.

Sony serves Microsoft…

After the initial reveals, everyone was watching the PS4/Xbox One drama. Sony didn’t just strike the right tone by reaching out to indies, they backed it up with exclusives and got extra mileage with snarky ads and trollish stunts.

… and Microsoft makes a solid recovery

It’s yet to be seen whether the PS4’s early buzz advantage will matter, though. After E3, Microsoft did a pretty complete 180, blurring the differences between the two systems. Titanfall in particular might match the PS4’s buzz, even if it isn’t exclusively for the Xbox One.

At this point, the console rivalry’s dropped off the radar of casual conversation; with much of the stain on the Xbox One nullified by the changes in policy, Microsoft might be able to build buzz properly when it actually launches.

Saint’s Row IV

For a couple weeks before and after launch, SR IV was getting talked up as much as BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us. Going back a few months, the chief selling point was that this would be as madcap weird as the third game, but with superpowers thrown in. Then the first gameplay section came out, with the Saints in a weird mix of alien invasion and Aaron Sorkin drama, with writing that lives up to Sorkin.

By the time the dubstep gun preorders started arriving, the game had built buzz that wasn’t going away, that this was a genuinely great game. The devs and publishers have kept that train rolling with Sony-worthy trolling, like the GAT V DLC on Steam the day GTA V came out for consoles.

At time of writing, it’s a month after release, and the GAT V stunt still has people talking about it. Right now, the Game of the Year list seems to be Saint’s Row IV, GTA V, BioShock Infinite, and Last of Us.

(Note: I've left GTA V off this list, for the moment, because I'm not sure how it'll shake out. If nothing else, it hasn't been surprising like Saint's Row IV, nor has it been a juggernaut like Infinite.)

DotA 2 makes its case

Somehow, after years of being League of Legends’ perpetually-in-beta cousin, DotA’s emerged as an equal in the MOBA space. League got a huge lead over the past few years, but DotA 2 is making its case, and it’s about equal in the

I’m reminded a lot of what one of my bosses is saying: Riot’s going to start to decline in 2014. It’s definitely far too early to make any calls, but League doesn’t have as strong a grip on the MOVA space as it used to, even in the Traditional subgenre it used to dominate.

BioShock Infinite - Analyzing the Corset Scene

I’ve been thinking about one particular scene in Bioshock Infinite, close to the end, that really lays bare the relationship between Booker and Elizabeth. Go watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cAhaUTlMdo, from 7:50 – 9:17, then come back – this is going to be spoileriffic.

Also, be aware that this is a very, very in-depth look at storytelling techniques. Walls of text are approaching.

[Trigger warning, I’m partly going to be analyzing this scene from a sexual assault perspective.]

Recent Firefly Announcements - What to Expect, and What Not

Now this is fascinating. We’ve got four different licensed Firefly products announced in the past few months, and I’m starting to wonder if there’s a pattern.

Four products: a social mobile game, a board game, a card game, and a pen & paper RPG system. All of these are officially licensed, and three of them had their licenses announced in Q1 of this year. We’ve also got a fifth data point: In April, there was an internet explosion as FOX tried to clamp down on unlicensed Jayne hats. Oh, and possibly a sixth: ThinkGeek (they of the official Jayne hat) is selling a Kaylee messenger bag in October.

First thing to note: All of these are using the Firefly name, not Serenity. The Dark Horse comics are Serenity, and the old RPG was Firefly as well. Second: It was a snafu, but Hatgate was almost certainly FOX asserting its ownership of the brand. This is after years and years of FOX being pretty hands-off.

So, what exactly are we seeing? First off, almost all of them are narrow in focus. The card, board and social games are (from what I’ve seen) only hitting the key brand points of the show: crew, ship, jobs, Alliance. The social game mentions something about exploring the ‘Verse, but it’s tertiary and I don’t believe it means an actual expansion of the canon.

Second, while there is a trend here, it isn’t a full-court press on the brand. If FOX were sinking tons of money or reputation into these products, especially on a brand like this, they’d be doing everything they could to push the core brand. There has been no DVD re-release, no photo-ops with the crew, nothing built to trigger the Geek Flood. Hell, it’s hard to even find Firefly on the FOX website.

Third, all of this is small potatoes. Margaret Weis Productions, which is doing the pen-and-paper RPG, seems solid, but it isn’t Hasbro/WotC. I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason FOX licensed it to a group MWP (which can probably command a better deal for using the license) is because they did the Serenity RPG back in the day. I don’t recognize any of the games from Toy Vault (the card game), and Gale Force Nine (the board game) only really has the Spartacus game to its name, which admittedly has been pretty popular.

What all of this tells me is the following, although you’re welcome to draw your own conclusions. First, this isn’t about a Firefly revival – at least, not in the way we’re probably thinking. No new movie is coming of this, no new show, no reboot. If there were, these tie-ins would either come after the big announcement, or would be big-scale tests of the water to try justifying a show.

Second, this isn’t a huge investment on FOX’s part. Whatever’s happening with Firefly, it’s not something that a board of brand directors is personally involved in; with these projects being as small as they are, this is more likely someone’s pet project. If FOX were strongly invested in it, they would be tying pieces together, and there would be a coherent vision of what they wanted to sell, probably expanding the fiction and letting writers go into new territory.

What I think is happening is that there’s a brand manager at FOX that grew up a Browncoat. They’ve fought hard and convinced the higher-ups that there’s money to be made with a property that’s lain fallow. As long as this property generates easy money – working with small companies, involving as few lawyers as possible, and not having to front much cost – this brand manager will continue to get the green light for giving out the license.

I don’t think we’ll see larger games/stories, though, nor will we see anything that pushes the fiction in a bold new direction. If I read this correctly, it’s a low-investment, constant-return project, and the potential returns wouldn’t justify the time put into the story meetings, the recruiting of writers, etc. Any brand decisions made right now could also block off potential future directions, which I think is why these projects are sticking so close to the existing brand.

So if I’m right, what will we see? More small projects – possibly many more. Anything Firefly-themed sells, and if my read is correct, the brand manager will be happy to slap Firefly on good products, even small ones. It’s worth noting that the card game is crowdfunding its printing, so indie-ish projects are possible. As more Firefly products get released, more people will pitch FOX, and I think we’ll see more and more of these.

Beyond that... it’s possible that this could get bigger. The more money that these projects make FOX, and the more good press they bring FOX, the more ammunition the brand manager has to expand. Under no circumstances do I think these could directly lead to a reboot, but they could lead to more ambitious spinoffs.

If Firefly games make enough money, maybe a double-A video game isn’t out of the question; maybe the RPG team gets to write about the ‘Verse during the war. Or a comic or board game designed around the Battle of Serenity Valley. I plan to throw some money at these projects, because that’s a game I’d love to play.

So, Godspeed, heroic brand manager. If you exist, may you fly under the radar, and may you make enough money that no one questions your decisions or reassigns you. We’re ready for a few more stories in this ‘Verse, and you’re making it possible.

(Note: I’m not the only person to have written about this. I do think this piece is different enough, though, especially with breaking down the business side.)

All the different products:

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/25018.html

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gamesalute/firefly-out-to-the-black

http://www.margaretweis.com/creative-directions/the-system-that-was

https://www.keepflying.com/

http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/f108/

Suicide Prevention is Pick Up

Apparently Oasis references can save lives.

I'm part of a fandom online -- rather, I'm usually a lurker, but I registered on a particular site yesterday. I wanted to join in the discussion, so I brought up the most recent posts, one of which was a stranger's suicide note.

This was probably more a cry for attention, but I am Matthew Pecot; I posted, saying that if she wanted to talk, I'd be happy to listen. It went back and forth -- me, one of her friends, and another stranger -- making no clear progress, until I called her "morning glory".

Fast forward to this evening, and she's still active. She hasn't posted anything, but she's Liked some pictures, so I know she's still alive. I'm smart enough to know that there was other stuff going on, that other people (especially her friend) were already talking to her. Most of the credit probably goes to them and what they said; at most, I helped crack a veneer of angst.

But the idea that pick-up, for all that people call it sleazy (usually myself included), could help to save lives? A fascinating, bizarre notion.


--

That's not the only interesting thing about this, though. One-liners below:


"I want a gif of Flynn (from Adventure Time) running around with his hands wobbling in the air, caption 'I DON'T KNOW SHIIIIIIIIIIIIT'".

--This is exactly how it felt. I fell back on the Morning Glory line because I had nothing else I could pull from. For fuck's sake, I'm a professional face, working as a community manager, and I still felt helpless to help her. When just saying "If you need to talk, I want to listen" isn't enough, how can a stranger help?

--I'm going to ask around for resources on how to help prevent suicide. The entire time this was happening, a part of my brain was screaming that I don't know what I'm doing.


In any traumatic situation, as the wait time increases, so too does the chance of getting bored and checking Facebook.

--Seriously. After I and the stranger made our latest posts, there wasn't much we could do besides wait. I didn't feel comfortable starting up a game, but being on call meant I couldn't go to sleep, either. So eventually, I spent an hour going through imgur, checking every few minutes in case she responded.

--It was odd and disheartening how disconnected I felt the whole time. Don't get me wrong, I hoped and hoped that it would turn out OK, but I also didn't feel like my life or happiness was resting on the outcome. It was very disheartening to think that, if someone died who I'd tried to help, I would probably be able to get through the next day.



So... there's a story about how Oasis could save lives. I don't really know how to wrap this up; on the one hand, I'm feeling disconnected enough that I could maybe write out a moral, but I'm also still digesting this. I guess take it as a story of how complicated people are.

Because they are. Dear God, are people complicated. If I didn't know before, now I know from the stranger in the conversation say that she could empathize, because she's traumatized and she  does BDSM and "every time she lets someone top her, she has to tell them that she won't stop them if they try to kill her."

To quote South Park, and I think the man Himself would agree, "Jesus FUCK," dude. People are complicated, and I can only hope I helped.

Gaming -- the Mid-Year Roundup

I’ve been playing a shit-ton of games over the past six months, and they’ve almost all been excellent. It’s frankly kind of insane how lucky I’ve been… although the fact that I’m months (or years) late to the party on some games is a contributing factor.

This isn’t meant to be a “Top 10, Play What I’m Playing” wankfest. This is part gratitude for how good these games are, part trying to identify the best parts of them. If I want to be a creator someday, I want to know what to take inspiration from.

Mass Effect series (October? to March?)

Hands-down, the best AAA long-form game/series I’ve ever played. Yes, better than BioShock Infinite… much as that pains me to admit, in the post-completion afterglow. The series as a whole is the new standard for both epic and personal gaming experiences. It was so well realized that a few months after I finished the series, I saw a stranger and thought, “That’s my Shepard.”

“Mass Effect 2: Doing bad things, to bad people, to unlock cut scenes.”

My own experience of this series is colored by themes I’m interested in, primarily sunsets and the sense of things coming to an end. Yes, the third game is my favorite – doesn’t hurt that it was the only one I tried to 100%. I also watched the director’s cut of the ending. Since I felt like the entire third game was a long goodbye, the quality of the actual ending didn’t much matter to me. Your mileage may vary.

Takeaway: Teams and NPCs. The best part of these games was your team, beyond question, and from the inter-battle cut scenes to the downtime, they were the reason to play. If we could combine the companion AI and battlefield interaction of Elizabeth (from Infinite) with a team like this, endless fountains of fan art would result.

BioShock (April)

Would you kindly read the rest of this article as well? The twist in this game is spectacular, absolutely phenomenal. Before that was good, but not amazing. I don’t think I need to explain why this game is good – it’s part of the gaming canon. I’m not even going to make the twist the key takeaway.

This isn’t going into my personal canon, though. The twist is going on my list, but the rest of my game isn’t there. I have the same complaint as everyone else – the rest of the story after the twist is pretty ehhhh. I had also played the first three hours of Bioshock a couple times before, so the setting didn’t hit me as hard. I also am not a big fan of the gameplay itself, mainly because I get confused and lost in shooters.

Takeaway: The intro. My God, the intro for this is perfect. You get shown everything you need to know, you panic without being able to screw yourself over, it’s amazing. It was so good, they used it again. It plays like the first read of Atlas Shrugged, when the characters are superheroes and you get swept away – then you start to reflect on it, and wonder whether it could really work, and you see the depths to which it falls. The Big Daddy reveal, and realizing that eventually you’re going to fight one, is huge.

Takeaway: The setting. The city doesn’t need to be a character as much as in BioShock or in film noir, but exploring a place like this adds hugely to the fantasy and the mood. If you’re going to set your game in a drab world of cityscapes and forests, it had damned well better be because it helps the story.

BioShock Infinite (June)

Disclaimer, when I originally wrote this article, I was writing this in the afterglow. I played most of BioShock Infinite in an uninterrupted, twelve-hour chunk. I am writing this having eaten two bowls of oatmeal and one granola bar over the past 48 hours. After finishing the game, I spent two hours reading up on the ending and critiques.

You might say I enjoyed it.

I’m not going to be able to bring much more to the conversation on Infinite than what’s already been said. The violence is important, but the visceral relish the game takes in it isn’t; the setting and art direction is spectacular; Elizabeth is a very well-made character; the ending is thought provoking. It gets a 9/10, and would probably go into my Greatest Of All Time list if the dialog were snappier and more frequent.

Takeaway: Every developer making an AI companion should be brain-melded with this game. The mechanics themselves are designed to drive attachment to Elizabeth -- from her calling out priority targets to scrounging up life-saving ammo, salts and health. Even better, she seems to prioritize finding exactly what you need at that moment! Without this mechanic, the game’s combat would be a long distraction from its real focus. With it, it makes the characters’ relationship and trust shared by the player, and makes the portions without Elizabeth hit the player like a gut-punch.

Champions Online (Ongoing)

I work on this game. Am I cheating? Absolutely. But (Takeaway) the costume creator… dear God, the costume creator. What genuinely talented people have made is amazing, to the point where joke characters as niche as “Retina Regular” can exist. Even someone like me can poke around with the randomizer until I find inspiration, then build a new costume in about an hour. That costume is a new perspective on an existing character, and it reveals more about her.

FTL

FTL wants you to lose. FTL is very good at getting what it wants. Here’s what I think holds FTL back from being a truly great game, though: It doesn’t have much that gets you attached to a play-through, and it doesn’t have all-in mechanics. I’m going to be drawing a lot of comparisons to XCOM to make these points.

First, I don’t get attached to the characters or the ship in each play-through. I may feel really damned good about getting five Mantises, but each Mantis doesn’t matter. There wasn’t anything unique in each run, so there wasn’t any reason to claw my way back from the abyss in a run – I was better off letting myself die and using a different strategy.

The other issue is similar, because in XCOM, I sometimes had a favorite character go down, and I went all-in to save her. Not that it was the best decision, but it spiked the tension and made the best game. In FTL, though, there’s no all-in mechanic, nothing that lets me decide that something really matters to me. Irrationality is investment.

Takeaway: I want more genres of roguelikes. The only other roguelike that hit it big(ish) was Spelunky, and this proves that almost any genre can handle random levels, emergent gameplay, and permadeath. I’m waiting for Rock Band: Rogue Edition.

Additional Takeaway: This is how micromanagement should be, without sucking up too much time or leaving you feeling grindy. In FTL, pause-play gameplay works because it’s more like yelling at the bridge crew to target their engines, hold fire for a broadside, and desperately relaying directions to your boarding team. It’s not about pausing your entire offensive to order a single division around. Micromanagement should be five seconds of play for a single second of pause, I’m going to say.

League of Legends

Do I even need to go into this one? I’ve been playing LoL for about two years now, and it remains an exceedingly well-crafted game. It’s never going to be great-tier, because some of the things that make it so good are psychological tricks – but damn, this is good.

Forty minutes. Ten players. Five roles. Three lanes. And I’ve played something like 415+ hours of this.

Takeaway: This is how you do free-to-play when you have the luxury of having made a really good game to work with. It’s addictive as heroin – I chase the dragon when I’ve been on a losing streak. Forty minutes is the perfect time to create a feedback loop, where it’s long enough to get seriously invested, but not long enough that you can’t play one more game.

XCOM

Bluh. XCOM. Best strategy game system I’ve ever played, hands down. XCOM has some bad pacing issues in the campaign, but in a given mission you can reach climaxes of tension and panic in a single-hour mission. And because it’s all emergent gameplay, the tension is just as intense with every play-through.

I do want to point out the flaws, though. The aliens getting free moves when you discover them is obvious bullshit, but the pacing of the campaign was what really got me. First off, if you get yourself ahead in economics – which takes re-rolling instead of getting an actual in-game briefing – you’ll never suffer from want. You’ll have moments of tactical tension, but the grand plan will never be derailed. And the fact that I only got the psykers at a point when I could just click through to start the final battle… I should get a while to play with all the toys, not have them handed to me just before nap time.

Takeaway: I guess this is simplicity, just as much as TBP. The clarity of it, from what kinds of cover you’re in to what kinds of risks you’ll face, is spectacular and fast. Grand strategy games take ages to deliver feedback on whether you’re playing well, and tactical games (that I’ve played) tend to fall back on complexity and end up unsatisfying. XCOM makes high-tension, deeply-personal outcomes from relatively few moving pieces, and it shows all the moving pieces.

They Bleed Pixels

This is a better hardcore platformer than Super Meat Boy. I said it, now you can argue about it until the end of time. I swore more often, and louder, in TPB. Note: I’m aware that you can’t directly compare the short-level vs checkpoints paradigms that the two games take.

I felt taxed harder and better in TBP. In particular, the level paradigm meant that you could get all the way through an unbelievably difficult chain of jumps then see the bullshit waiting on the other side, and having (limited) health meant that a dumb slip was penalized, but not fatal. You then had to claw your way through with a single heart, which amped up tension even more.

Plus there’s the aesthetics. As much as I liked the setting and style of some SMB levels, the mythos in TPB is something that I could see incorporated into the larger Lovecraft mythos.

Takeaway: Simple and difficult. Two buttons, very few moves, but incredibly difficult. Reducing the number of moving parts meant that there were no bullshit issues like getting caught on geometry, getting confused, being slammed by a million enemies. Simple design, difficult challenges. (Additional takeaway: I hate feeling confused.)

Lord Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle

The only free indie on the list – my, times have changed for me. I think I found this one while looking for a customization-heavy JRPG, in the aftermath of finishing Mass Effect. This is decidedly not that game, but I lucked into this beautiful send-up of JRPGs. I compare it to Recittear, except you’re playing as the princess who gets rescued, after the rescuing already happened.

Also, it has one of the best uses of a major trope ever.

Takeaway: The dialog is spectacular. Better than Portal, hear me? The writing is perfectly-paced nerd humor at the intersection of D&D, anime and JRPGs. I have three-and-a-third pages of quotes and one-liners from Embric, most of it M-rated. Almost all of the game has a breakneck pace of hilarious dialog, and every comedic game writer should play this.

Mirror's Edge Analysis - Surprisingly BioShock-ish!

I just finished Mirror's Edge. Naturally, that means that rather than sleep, I have to digest and write about it. Spoilers are... well, it's not like there's too much lost if the plot's spoiled, but mid-tier spoilers.

1) Faith's character

The plot may not be stellar, but Faith is an interesting character. "Amoral" doesn't quite fit the bill. In my opinion, she can be seen in two ways: resistance fighter, or cynical veteran of nonviolent protesting.

Mirror's Edge's plot is very MTV cartoon, both in depth and in tone. This means that some of the subleties of a character don't always come through. There also isn't much dialog or cut-scene to reveal her character, so the real character-building moments happen during gameplay.

Personally, there's enough of a split between the two ways of playing the game (stealth-alike runner versus kill everything) that I feel it's fair to split Faith's character into two possibilities. Both are interesting, and she's a strong character regardless -- but the sheer nebulousness of Faith is kinda fascinating. I have a mental image of her (in the cutscene, cartoon form) holding an M4.

Anyway. Interesting character, and an interesting example of how gameplay determines how players view the characer.

2) Feminism: It's Good!

How many other games hit all of these criteria?

a) Passes the Bechdel test

b) Features a female protagonist (or main character)

c) Is a AAA, mainstream game

d) Doesn't sexualize the female protagonist. Or in this case, any character, period.

I know I'll be drawing comparisons to BioShock Infinite later, but Infinite's one of the only other games I can think of, off the top of my head (your mileage may vary on Infinite). Faith and Celeste are buds, Faith and Kate are sisters, and they all talk like real humans. Faith's is sexy because she's a smart, fit and extremely capable person, not because of her outfit -- call her an Alyx Vance type of character, if that helps explain the kind of healthy sexy I mean. And at no point does the script play up any sexuality.

Don't misinterpret me, I'm not praising Mirror's Edge for being clinical and sexless, but it feels like almost every other game with a strong female protagonist (Mass Effect, say) at least taps into that vein of being willing to be sexy and/or sensual. There's room in the gaming world for sexless games with female protagonists, as there is for them with male protagonists, and it's good to see Mirror's Edge fit that space.

(Note: While I try to promote feminism, especially in games, please don't hesitate to call me out if you see a flaw in what I say hear -- whether I missed something horrifying, or if I mis-present feminism's case on this. Also, yes, I'm aware that movements aren't monolithic, yadda yadda I was a sociology major I will conditionalize until I talk myself to death if no one stops me.)

3) Comparing Mirror's Edge to BioShock

I'm definitely a horrible person, because very few games compare well to Ken Levine's baby, both original and Infinite. It's a worthwhile comparison though, in this case, because all of these are games with some non-shooter spark that gets tripped up by (some of) their shooter baggage.

In my opinion, Mirror's Edge is a puzzle game when it's at its best. The best moment I had had zero flow, zero combat, and zero guidance from the game beyond "Get to this location." If you've played, it's the sequence in climbing to the top floor of the mall under construction, where the walkway at each floor is built, but they aren't connected.

And then immediately afterwards, you're tasked with descending down the other side of the mall, in a wide stairwell filled with enemies. Worse, the space is designed so that it actually strips away your normal runner "vocabulary" of actions: There's no ledge to jump to, allowing you to bypass guards, and if you try to just sprint past them, the stairwell is big and open enough that you just get gunned down. Personally, I had to go into shooter mode, which the game is eminently bad at.

There are a couple of these encounters that are just plain bad. Even if I wanted to play Faith as a shooty character, the difficulty comes from swarms of enemies, and tactical depth is limited to just trying to kite enemies away from each other, so you can run in and grab dropped weapons after your own runs dry. And since my interpretation of Faith's character depends on whether she shoots and kills enemies, having that decision forced on me by bad game design rankles.

It reminds me a lot of some of the fights in BioShock Infinite. We can all agree Infinite wasn't about the shooting, right? It usually did it pretty well, but it could've existed in another genre and still had the same essence. In particular, I'm thinking of the ghost boss. That goddamn ghost boss. I had that same sense of frustration in Mirror's Edge in the later combat set pieces. (There were other issues I had with Infinite rooted in its shooting, but that's the big example.)

Look, I work in the industry. I know that having some shooting pieces probably helped the game sell... maybe three times as much. Could well be. But evaluating it as a game, the sheer frustration these caused me knocked the game down a lot in my book.

And there you have it! Well worth the... what is it, $10 now? It's not a full-price game, but a good game to get on sale.

Drinking Whiskey, Step By Step

I've been trying to write more often, but I'm not quite managing to pull my main project together. For the moment, I've been writing whatever strikes my fancy, preferably visceral, description-heavy pieces. Such as this step-by-step description of drinking and tasting whiskey.

(Fun fact: I was using cheap whiskey for this, so you could probably use Control-F to make this about Listerine, too!)

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Take a sip. It starts with the crackle of pop rocks, spreading through the amber and fizzing away like fireworks. Stir it, and the sparks catch into a Listerene burn. The pocket of air at the roof of your mouth gets colder and colder, as the numbness spreads from the whiskey.

Blind-firing neurons start carving trenches across your tongue as your heartbeat rises, your taste buds caught between the whiskey tide and the hammering pulse. Finally, your tongue starts to pull, to twist, with the burning subsiding into a slow pressure that inverts the tip of your tongue.

Swallow, and feel the ridges along the roof of your mouth, slick with relief. They’re cast into sharp profile by your pulse, still heavy in your mouth. Open and breathe, the air hot as it races through the cavern of your jaw, and your eyes droop as you exhale.

Now. Eye the glass again.

Serenity Analysis -- Mal's Story

I re-watched Serenity at Baycon yesterday – eight years or so after I first watched Firefly, I understand movies better.

The first time around with Serenity, I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I could say why. The writing isn’t nearly as good as the series proper, most of the cast has no character development, and the business issues kept the Firefly name and theme song out of Serenity. But it was still satisfying, and now I understand why: Mal is a perfect example of the hero’s journey.

For those who don’t know, the Hero’s Journey is a story structure that’s an expansion on the standard three-act template; you’ll hear people refer to Star Wars (Episode IV) especially. If you look at the way Serenity is structured, it’s very similar to A New Hope, with some of the exact same story beats (dead family on a desert planet, anyone?).

The entire point of Serenity is Mal. Period. Other characters reach endings, but only Mal develops and overcomes challenges. And every change that happens and decision that Mal makes is reflected in the wider world. He travels out to and back from places when he’s making a spiritual pilgrimage, and the Serenity herself suffers as he does. It’s this reflection that makes his hero’s journey so satisfying.

The constant movement from world to world punctuates each stage of the hero’s journey. There are twelve stages to the hero’s journey, and generally they’re a progression as the hero learns more and more —except there points where the hero is set back, or returns to the scene of an earlier defeat with the tools to triumph. Mal and the Serenity have two returns in Serenity: going back to Book, and returning from Miranda.

In the first case, it’s the refusal to face the Alliance, and trying to run from the fight again. As Jayne puts it, it’s hiding under the Shepherd’s skirts. For the first part of the movie, Mal has tried everything to keep his ship flying, and he’s been willing to cut out crew and hide with a monastery to do it. This return is a failure – page through your dictionary and find the phrase “Carthiginian peace”.

When he’s coming back from Miranda, though, he’s finally achieved apotheosis. He’s returning and bringing the truth, and charging straight into the guns of the Alliance with it; the fact that the truth is a fleet of murderous Reavers is just a physical manifestation of his own determination to see justice served.

The other way Mal’s journey is illustrated is in the Serenity herself. The Serenity was always the tenth character on the show, and because Mal is The Captain and the ship is his home, it’s a powerful mirror for him. When the Serenity is desecrated to pass as a Reaver ship, it hurts as much because it’s scarring the Serenity as because they’re desecrating the dead. (Maybe more, if you’re cynical.) No grim and gritty statement from Mal could ever show his willingness to go savage as scarring his home. This corresponds to the descent into the underworld – the grim second movie of the trilogy, if you will, when the hero gives into anger and flirts with the dark side.

The flip side is the return to Mr. Universe’s planet, and the destruction of the Serenity as they pass the blockade. Unless I missed something, the Serenity has burnt off its obscene decorations and fixed the smudge trail, purging Mal’s dark side. Instead, it gets the shit kicked out of it – the same way that Mal does as he fights the Operative. The only thing Mal has that keeps him flying is gumption, same as the Serenity, and the damage on his ship amps up just how close he gets pushed. The fact that the Serenity never actually gets destroyed is a complete reflection of Mal’s character, though, and patching her back up in the dénouement also reflects his completion of his journey.  

Additional note: The final battle the rest of the crew fights, where they’re holding the line against Reavers? The Battle of Serenity Valley. It’s a perfect bookend with the series’ opening scene, with Mal getting to go back to when he believed – and this time, he gets to win.

So, tl;dr version? Serenity is the hero’s journey, starring Captain Malcom Reynolds, and the use of setting and the Serenity herself is one of the best implementations of the hero’s journey that I’ve ever seen. There are tons of other issues with the movie, and an ensemble franchise like this is done a disservice by focusing exclusively on one character, but

(Also, I know someone’s going to say it – no, this story had nothing to do with River. She is not Character Arc B. I’m sorry, but her character arc was going from being crazy with an unstoppable mode, to being a crazy who can intentionally activate unstoppable mode, with nothing in between. River was a part of the plot, like the rest of the crew, rather than actually being a driving character.)

Autocomplete: Criminal Edition

Today, I tried going to OhJoySexToy.com, the new webcomic by Erika Moen (an excellent, primarily-autobiographical cartoonist), typing in simply “sex” and letting Google do the rest. The result?

… what the fuck, Google?

Facebook One-Liners (Repost)

Writing! I've been putting together a ton of one-liners for Facebook, and here's my claim to eventual Mitch Hedberg levels of fame.

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My Facebook ads used to be all for dating sites; now they're all "New game for Men 21+" game ads. Even Facebook's given up on me.

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Maturity isn't fighting, fucking, or paying bills. Maturity is choosing not to watch one more episode or playing one more turn, and I will never be an adult.

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The Final Fantasy dev team must be the worst in bed. "Sure, the first twelve hours are gonna SUCK, but after that it gets pretty okay!"

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In English, our curse words are spiritual, sexual, and scatological. With a combination like that, no wonder we're so weird.

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Forget the power of house and happy hardcore, for so much has been forgotten, never to be raved again. Forget the promise of ambient and synthpop, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only THE DROP.

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Okay, my company officially needs to get me Photoshop. My preview gifs to sell upcoming taunts are outclassed by Tumblr porn.

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I want to play a 4X strategy game with Axe doing voiceover.

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I wrote something today. Doesn't matter how small, doesn't matter how good, doesn't matter if it only took an hour -- these are the four magic words that make the other eight hours you spent on Civ 5 totally okay.

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Irony: Spending twenty minutes choosing the perfect relaxing video to fall asleep to.

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K. A. Applegate wrote Harlequin novels under a pen name. I kinda want to read them, just to watch my childhood squirm.

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"It is well that League is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it."

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There's nothing dumber than spending an hour vigorously french kissing the food stuck in your teeth before realizing, "Hey, I'm at home; I own floss."

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"Danger is my middle name" implies weird parents. "Danger is my maiden name" implies the most badass wedding reception ever.

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Pants on or off, eating and porn don't mix.

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Pants are like goldfish. We all had them in elementary school; they're generally unnoticed, unless they're disproportionately-sized; and if you forget about them long enough, eventually a kid's going to go into hysterics.