rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

lol adam

xp Sure, but there is still a line between "I am aware of this and may support other people doing it" and "turn right thumbstick to make suspect scream"

(that basically serves as a response to adam as well - The immense increase of popularity and profile of manshoots is definitely a new thing in the last decade or so)

(and the realism is the actual connection between the two posts)

can we not use the term "manshoots", this is not ILTMI

Throwing Bowser into a giant lake of fire is pretty fucked up

not really, he's got a carapace

this is from 98 but has some interesting info if you have access to sciencedirect or some other journal database:

Dill KE, Dill JC. Video game violence: a review of the empirical literature.  Aggression Violent Behavior.1998;3:407-428.

i'm looking for literature about violence in childhood play throughout history, no luck yet.

"Although youngsters would be denied admittance to the latest Steven Segal movie without parental supervision, they are able to enter any department or toy store in America and purchase graphically violent games like Mortal Kombat or Killer Instinct without censure."

thinking of non-violent videogames now, of which I guess the historical standard is Tetris? maybe Pong?

It gets easier to find them as you go back to before they were big bu$ine$$.

i remember Nickelodeon had a show called 5W or something (reference to Who What Where When Why questions of journalism) where kids did 'investigative reporting' and one of the episodes was about violence in video games and showed footage from Doom

doom seems so quaint now, like, these are demons from hell! fucking shoot them!

my parents pretty much let me play whatever but once i was playing wolf3D and my dad stood behind me and watched me shoot nazis for a while and then launched into this impromptu dramatic scene where he played both the dead nazi's wife and the dead nazi's son, who was waiting up that night for his father to come home because he'd made him some kind of present but his father was late coming home and it was way past his bedtime and his mother was saying just go to bed dear you'll see him in the morning etc

parenting

nazis tho! i mean if you can't shoot nazis whom can you shoot

i guess that's the point

it's also hard to extricate violence from conflict in terms of games. in pong you are in direct conflict with your opponent (or simulated opponent if you are playing agains the fiendish AI) and while you are not committing acts of violence upon his or her avatar in-game i am willing to bet that a lot of the neurochemical reactions are the same ones that go down when you pop some motherfucker with a sick headshot in call of duty.

so then i guess one could ask why pong 2012 (virtua tennis?) isn't selling 40 billion copies.

hah awesome.

Yeah im trying to think of a non-violent videogame and it's just not coming to my head. The Monkey Island series is pretty non-violent.

Maybe that's what we get with a medium invented on military equipment developed for World War II.

Tiny wings. Orbital. Trainyard (omg train crashes though!). Does Fez have baddies in? Violent ones?

most adventure games are mostly nonviolent, especially the myst strain; there are lots of complaints to make about dumb ol myst (tho not about riven which is that genre's one stone masterpiece) but i always thought a lot of the vitriol directed its way by Real Gamers was connected to its lack of violence

a few years back i wrote up a short scene set around the kitchen table of a generic enemy from the first level of Castlevania III. he gathers his immediate family, along with his best friend who works in the second level of Donkey Kong Country, to deliver the bad news - Trevor is approaching Dracula's castle, and he is rumored to be very good at Castlevania III. death is a certainty. they then go on to have a frank and rewarding discussion about the inevitability of death and the meaning of service.

hahahahahaha

yeah there are totally lots of non-violent games, just like there are games or other forms of play that are non-violent/non-conflictual. i'm just saying that conflict/violence simulation must scratch a particular neurological itch, which is all right and natural, but i'm curious (and i think bissell is too even if he's not all that good at saying it) about what attracts us to the trappings of realistic violence.

so in the last splinter cell game, conviction, there's an occasional minigame where michael ironside drunkenly interrogates foreigners and effeminate men by smashing their heads into objects in the environment. it's only one button press (B on the xbox) and dude goes into this whole animation and audio thing.

new splinter cell is taking us one step closer to 1:1 torture control (better with kinect!) which feels like a separate neurological path from conflict entirely.

Does Fez have baddies in? Violent ones?

Well, the longer you play, the more you rip apart the fabric of the universe. There are bombs but no sentient baddies.

i really should get around to picking Fez up

I couldn't get into Fez at all :(

Partially because of the performance stuttering with its constant autosaving. Partially because I felt it was vague and somewhat poorly designed / structured. Regret buying it, tbh.

I finished it and definitely enjoyed it, but I have no desire to try to find the rest of the blue cubes.

> Yeah im trying to think of a non-violent videogame and it's just not coming to my head

pong

Animal Crossing

xp couldn't you say this of like 90% of all adventure games or puzzle games ever made?

also ZS i wanna read that

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/raul-menendez-99.php

http://www.booksofadam.com/2012/07/i-want-to-play-game.html

Kayin wrote this over on the tigsource forums and I found it interesting:

Though you mostly just seems like your butthurt over how popular me and my game are.

Yeah, I'll admit that I don't understand why these games have been so popular. It's frustrating because they aren't really anything exceptional from a design, art, or compositional stand-point (sorry). I think most of my criticism is directed at the first game, less towards this new one, which offers better presentation but yes, I find this particular genre of games to be un-fun. It's not that I don't like to be challenged! I just don't like it when I have to perform the same task over and over again without any sort of reward.

Yet people do often like doing things over and over, in horrible, brutal ways. Even with modern design aesthetics (Dark Souls)! Some people like harsh learning. Some people spend hours every day trying to juggle. Other spend hours every day trying to hit a base ball. Others do speed runs of Super Metroid under intense, uncompromising standards. Others like more brisk, fun experiences. The spectrum of resistance potential players can enjoy is huge. It's fine if you don't like it -- there are plenty of popular things I don't like. But you should understand it, because it's a real thing. They might be a smaller segment of the population, but the deserve to be served by willing devs all the same and doing so is not inherently "bad design".

Lately I've been playing the original Spelunky on PC. This game is a good example of near-perfect design, AND it's extremely challenging. I've invested hours into the game already and I'm constantly wanting to come back for more. I'm sure we could get into all of the reasons that Spelunky works as well as it does, but I'm sure plenty of other thread do. I think the bottom line is that if you mess up in Spelunky it's entirely the player's fault. You failed to look before you leap. Your games, on the other hand, are completely unpredictable. It's like hanging out with somebody who seems cool at first until he sucker-punches you in the gut... again... and again. It's just not fun (for me).

First, there is no perfect design, nor is something like challenge and difficulty a neat little number line where "Oh, Spelunky hits all the notes just right". For example, I love Spelunky, but it was, FOR ME, just too damn easy and playing it, especially for score, became very tedious or even luck based (you need a lot of stuff going for you to be able to do things like farm diamonds from ghosts). Playing "casually" was just a formality in beating the game for the 100th time.

Now, that's all good and fine. I enjoyed the game a ton. Same for like, Binding of Isaac which I helped playtest and got crazy win/death ratios on. Difficulty means different things to different people and the type of difficulty they enjoy is ALSO different. Heck, with Spelunky, the balance is excellent when just playing to win. "Yeah you only fail because you made a mistake", but when you play the game at a high level, you get fucked over all the time. You play Castlevania and it starts off unfair and near impossible and becomes a very fair game about run optimization. They're thinking the same thing you're thinking about their games about the games you like, because difficulty can't be tuned perfectly for every skill level. Not that IWBTG is fair, but we'll get to that.

Spelunky might have hit a lot of great notes, but so did the Beatles and not everyone likes them. Perhaps Spelunky deserves more credit (in fact, I'd agree with that!), but it can't be everything to everyone.

You say that you're appealing to a niche, but I strongly disagree; your view count/downloads reflect quite the opposite. Gameplay footage of your original game has 1.5 million views on Youtube, which is more than the most-viewed videos of Spelunky, Super Meat Boy, and VVVVVV combined. The problem I have with that is that your games appear sloppy, lazy, and gimmicky compared to these other titles, which feature original graphics and themes, while yours uses ripped sprites and tiles and rudimentary gameplay that offers nothing fresh or new besides extreme masochism.

Okay sure, but keep in mind, not all those views are PLAYS. Some games are better to watch than others. IWBTG has a LOT of downloads and, based on that list, Spelunky is the only game that's free. So that's not a great metric. That said, you're right. Last time I talked about this someone said to me "That's not fair to say. People at my college were talking about how much they liked it". So okay, it's not expressly NICHE, but it's definitely a very particular thing... anyways, I think the foolish thing you're doing is thinking that the game does nothing fresh or new "besides extreme masochism"(one thing the game definitely does NOT originate. We both grew up in the NES era). IWBTG could not exist out of context. It could not be sent back in time. It examines, parodies and lampshades old games. It also does a lot with player psychology. The game gets in peoples heads. It surprises them. You might not find it interest or surprising when you play the game for 5 minutes (which I don't hold against anyone), but the people who DO play it CAN appreciate those elements. The game has a sense of psychology and absurdity that has surprising appeal. That's why many games that came after IWBTG stumbled. All the "IWBT-blank-" fangames or Abobo's Big Adventure (which had 10000000000x more visual polish than IWBTG but no sense of comedic timing) sorta fell flat, but IWBTG remained the king of it's weird little dumb pseudo-genre.

Look, I'm sorry for being such a dick about this and responding to your work so harshly; no doubt you've also worked hard to make these games and you loved what you were doing, which is great. I just disagree with your design philosophy entirely and it saddens me that it works so well. I guess traditional methods of game design are obsolete. I might as well stop developing now, because this era of consumers clearly isn't my demographic.

This is silly. Like Upthorn said, IWBTG appeals to old sentiments, not modern consumerism (Which isn't a real thing anyways, but whatever). Also instead of being so grumpy, bitter and defeatist about it, why don't you LEARN from it? I don't even mean this in an arrogant "I'm awesome" way. You can learn from EVERYTHING. So if a game you think looks like crap is super insanely popular, maybe you should stop and go "Okay, but why?" while not falling into a defeatist mindset. The sense of psychology and player prediction in IWBTG can definitely be used else where. The pacing and comedic timing? Telling jokes through stage design? This doesn't have to be linked to killing the player. That doesn't have to be linked to a hard game (though it probably helps). Heck, you don't even have to use any of it -- just being aware of it gives you more context to learn from other games you experience, increasing your expertise in general!

It's sorta like Chesterton's Fence. Don't take down a Fence until you understand why it was put there to begin with. If you're just going to dismiss something that's popular that doesn't appeal to your ideology, you're just going to lose out.

Also talking like traditional good design is dead is ridiculous and unfounded. People should be happy that weird niche games can achieve crazy popularity along with more focused, polished games. If IWBTG in it's "Hey guys check out my first game" laziness can achieve such popularity, well... that's a sign that there is a lot of potential design space in that direction. That's awesome! IWBTG only worked in it's barely finished state because that segment of the market was unserved.

Heck if I thought IWBTG was the future, I'd give up too, because I wouldn't wanna live in that world either, but fortunately it's a ridiculous idea.

The non-italicized bits are his.

forks, that adam ellis post was great

referring to IWBTG, i'm not sure the guy adequately defended his game, if that's what he was going for (i'm not sure) but i'm on the side that it's great as an art piece and absolutely terrible as a "game"

I'm having fun with the new one, which is what he's talking about. It's actually pretty well-designed, and there are times when I'm playing when I get flashbacks to cutting my teeth on a super difficult nes game or FLaiL or something, and I think, This game is easier. It has a lot of variety, both in what you look at and in what you do, and I haven't felt like giving up, yet - and this comes from someone who doesn't try to finish 99% of the games he plays.

Tonight I was playing a section of a stage I've been on for a couple of days, and it said, "What a horrible night to have a curse," and then the screen became red tinted and the spinning fireball wands from the smb boss levels started going backwards. It was funny, and I had to figure out a new way to get through the level, which turned out to be easier. Still can't beat that boss, though.

ugh you're gonna make me boot into Windows so i can play this eh. fiiiine. (soon) also, FLaiL?

Oh, man, I don't really want to recommend it to anyone. I like it, that's all.

FLaiL is by the give up, robot guy. It's the ninth one down on this page:

http://www.mattmakesgames.com/

It's precision platforming in the N+ style. I didn't finish FLaiL, either, but it's good if you like precision platforming.

p.s., the new iwbtg crashes sometimes. It boots back up pretty fast, so it doesn't bother me.

oh yeah, i've played Give Up Robot and MoneySeize. i'll give it a try, but for some reason i didn't get hooked on those, though the presentation of both was pretty good

that booksofadam guy otm. playing games is the best. these days most of the stuff i'm reading on videogames are long discursive passages about nethack minutiae. it seems endlessly fascinating to me but idk about anyone else.

Looking forward to geeking out on Ultima with this:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/48188850/The-Official-Book-of-Ultima

I like Leon Arnott's twitter:

http://twitter.com/webbedspace

my parents pretty much let me play whatever but once i was playing wolf3D and my dad stood behind me and watched me shoot nazis for a while and then launched into this impromptu dramatic scene where he played both the dead nazi's wife and the dead nazi's son, who was waiting up that night for his father to come home because he'd made him some kind of present but his father was late coming home and it was way past his bedtime and his mother was saying just go to bed dear you'll see him in the morning etc

omg

i liked the bit near the end of snake eater where you have to brush shudderingly past the moaning zombie bodies of every single enemy you killed to get to that point

spoiler alert! jk, man i gotta get around to that one

someone tell me if this fits here:
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/2012/07/38-studios-end-game/print/

It was posted last week on Curt Schilling, 38 Studios, and Rhode Island , but it is def. worth reading.

It's an interesting question whether it's really 'about' videogames, like is it just that now games are Bigger Than Hollywood, they take the monorail slot of things dumb people on town / county / state councils can be easily convinced are worth throwing money at.

And the fact that Curt Schilling was apparently an enormous WoW-head - he must've been a nightmare, albeit a familiar one.

Though I've heard of various states/countries offering tax incentives for video game developers, this is the first true Monorail-style public funding debacle (love this use of the Monorail ref btw) revolving around a video game company