We tend to use the terms 'games' in the colloquial. Generally speaking, we know what this means, but it's still pretty dependant on context. Like, you'll hear people draw distinctions between games and sports, for example. Or, we kind of intuit the difference between a game that children make up to entertain themselves in the moment and, say, a board game. We're oddly less specific about how we name video games, though. What I didn't really know, actually, was how finicky academics have tried to get with game definitions and catagories - here, the problem seems to be one of nomenclature. Basically, we use the word "game" as a catchall for a certain type of behavior within organized parameters, but not all games function the same way.

I drew most of my direct knowledge from the academic treatment of games from the broad strokes laid down in Nielsen, Smith, Tosca's Understanding Video Games. The book itself was helpful, but I'm not impressed with scholarship's treatment of videogames in general, yet.

For me, it seems more foolish to treat all videogames as part of a single, unified category than it would be to treat all movies or televised media in the same way. You can, insofar as it's broadly the same kind of media format, but aside from the broadest strokes, it doesn't make too much sense to try to discuss something like the JRPG game genre in the same way as you'd attempt to address football-based sports games. Discussion like this seems to be designed as something of a time-saving device, anyhow.

Additionally, there are quite frequently games that aren't actually games - or games that are only games depending on why you play them. I think of Minecraft, here. Initially, there was some discussion as to if Minecraft was really a game at all - you could certainly 'play' it or, more appropriately, you could play in it, but it didn't have any specific goal or any organized opposition. It was more like an environment or a simulation. (Though, referring to it as a simulation gets troublesome - a simulation of what, exactly?) Today, Minecraft does, actually, have an end-game, a boss, a way of completing the session, even though executing it only drops you back into the same core session. I don't play Minecraft with any real intention of ever reaching the end boss and defeating it, though I do want to investigate and build in every realm of the game. By most definitions, that would make me bad at the game, or at least playing it incorrectly, but I don't feel that's the case. There's an issue of intent, I think, then.

That also raises a question of games like Dungeons & Dragons, or World of Darkness products, or many other tabletop role-playing games, or games in which there is a story mode, but no real particular emphesis on that kind of organized, linear play like, maybe, the famous Grand Theft Auto series.

To my mind, then, "game" is increasingly an ineffective term of analysis, as there's too much play in the term. Or, maybe what would be better would be for we academics to accept a certain amount of ambiguity that's inherant in the act of play - not that rigor is bad, but all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
I've been playing Fallout 4 for a while, at this point, and I feel like I can say I've gotten a decent amount of milage out of it. I put about 40-something hours into it, largely dicking around, and, well, it's certainly a Fallout game. Everything that the Fallout 3+ franchise has been, has been too - with the addition of making buildings.

I really am thinking about what the game allows you to do - it expands the level cap out forever, but also hides a lot of rudimentary community building tools behind the Perk system which means that you're always choosing between being better at playing the game and being allowed to access the game. I've been a little disappointed by the lack of access to certain kinds of building materials - no glass, no windows, no metal grating - and the difficulty of accessing good places to build. Like, there are some good locations, and a lot of miserable, uninteresting locations which really makes me wonder why they're there.

So, I find myself trying to build a really cool base of operations and I'm really hampered by all of these invisible rules - tiles don't match up, it's difficult to build foundations and/or stair that connect to where you want floors to go, I can't tell at a glance who's assigned to what, or what has someone assigned, workshop management is a huge chore, moving food between settlements is a trial, land management is difficult, growing space is incredibly scarce, and so on. I devoted myself back to the grind, and the game stopped letting me save my files. I fixed/worked around that and the game ended up crashing and told me to update it.

I was just like, man, forget this for now. I'll come back to it with a much more reasonable focus, and hopefully after there have been some patches and DLC that include new building material. What I'm really hoping for is that this kind of community-building, world-building approach catches on even more with future games, whether it's this model or another one.
atolnon: (Default)
( Jun. 19th, 2014 02:38 pm)
I finished playing through the Mass Effect series kind of a while ago. There's a lot going on in the series, and it's long, so between the varied gameplay mechanics, the general romance options that are pretty important to people, the overall plot, the much-derided ending, ect, et al, I didn't know what to focus on and kind of gave up commenting until shit settled like sediment and I could get an idea of what I wanted to say about what.

But really, what always happens is that the moment gets lost and I'm left holding a much vaguer, more generalized attitude about the game more suitable for a somewhat gauzy press-release statement than critical commentary. I've got the time, though, and I don't want to totally just flake on it, so I figured I'd go ahead and spit something out, considering that it's been over a week since I've posted anything here.

First, the trilogy is pretty huge. 1 and 2 are fairly quick, though I have to admit that I landed on literally every planet that Mass Effect 1 would let me land on. Three was probably about as long as 1 and 2 put together with the DLC, especially the ending and the Citadel DLC. I missed free DLC for ME1 and regret it. I think that I got the Kasumi DLC and Katie got the Leviathan, From the Ashes, ending, and Citadel DLC for ME3 and Lair of the Shadow Broker for ME2. The fact that some of it is free now is great. The content is really good, but if I had just purchased the trilogy instead of having them on the shelf for literally as long as I've been here, I'd probably feel pretty frustrated at having to pay anything extra for important content.

Through the whole play through, I couldn't really imagine wanting to play Renegade and I'm pretty indifferent to most romance options presented in most games that I play. ME is one of those games where if you go about it correctly, you can almost always have your cake and eat it, too, so there's nothing that I think I'd really feel I have to go back to the game to experience. The gameplay is consistently good across the series, and really smooth in 3, so that I could pretty easily see going back to the games for the gameplay aspect, to play different DLC and spotlight different characters in my party while playing a different class and making slightly different decisions for funsies. Even after I'm done playing it, I have absolutely no qualms about keeping it on my shelf. The world building is likewise pretty top-notch (even though the beginning of ME1 is awkward and almost a little nonsensical).

Like I said, though, it tends to be pretty long. In reading terms, it's like tackling a few Iain Banks novels in a row. Certainly possible, and even enjoyable, but if you have a huge gaming, literary, and movie queue, it can be kind of hard to justify going back to a 160+ hour series. But if you dig RPGs and science fiction, I feel like it's something you'd do well to aim for at least once.
atolnon: (Default)
( Jun. 8th, 2014 09:42 am)
So, my friend The Jenna had an extra copy of To the Moon that she got from a Humble Indie Bundle a little while ago, and she passed it along to me. I kind of accepted it sight unseen because nobody else seemed interested and I was like, hey, free game. I played it for a little while before I Google'd it and discovered that it won a shitload of awards.

Let's see, actually. It was made in RPG Maker XP and, no shit, won Best indie RPG of 2011. Its reviews are generally excellent. It beat Portal 2, Catherine, and Xenoblade Chronicles for Best Story. It was nominated for significantly more.

Look, I played it. It took like, 3 hours. It was okay. It was only okay because it was so short, really. It wasn't great. It wasn't even especially good. It wasn't even really a game. The only way it was similar to an RPG is that it was made using RPG Maker. If the dialogue was written into a book, nobody would read it. To compare it to Portal 2 is an embarrassment.

Best Story? Really? Man, have you guys ever read any books at all? In 2011, is this the game that we all looked at and decided was going to represent the peak of our video game storytelling capacities for that year?

It was more like an interactive novella, and in that regards it served to pass a little time in a kind of unremarkable way. I'm not really hating on the game. I guess I'm hating on the player. 

I want to talk about future plans, I suppose, but there's stuff I've been musing on and I want to see what it looks like when it gets written out as an idea in print, so I've been thinking about civilization building games. Namely, the Civilization series. I bought Civ 4 pretty recently, because I don't really treat myself often and Civ's a game with a lot of milage built into it. So I put about 24 hours into it over the last week, burnt myself out on it for a while, and it's idling for now.

In the meantime, I was playing a marathon-length game before and I hit that point in the game where I loaded up a bunch of ships with soldiers and a Settler and sent it overseas to colonize the new continent.

Civ 4 has Barbarians, just like the civs before it did, and unlike in 2, they can found cities before you ever land. They don't branch out, they're little city states, and if they take over your city, sometimes they'll sack it and sometimes they'll run it. All the barbarian states are the same color - black - and they don't seem to fight one another, and they're usually a technology level equal or a level lower to you. Declaring war is all  you can do with them, but they're named after real cultures, so you might end up fighting a war of attrition with a place like Polynesia, Ananazi, Cherokee, or Gaul. (The entry for Barbarian in Civ 4 on the Wikia says, "Barbarians cannot be bargained with or appeased: they must be destroyed - before they destroy you!")

I was sitting in my chair and, of course I was going to sack the cities because they kept sending troops to raze my township. (Wisely, really, since my plan was to take over the whole continent and, later, the whole globe.) There was no negotiating with them, and nobody gets mad when you raze a barbarian civilization from the globe because that's what you're expected to do. They can build no alliances and they have no representation. Man alive, colonization at work, eh?

I'm not like... mad about it or anything. Civ is a lot of fun, but there are methods of playing that are really good for winning the game that are terrible in real life. But there's nothing that you gain from being a nicer ruler, and there's no person to talk to about it, you govern in a vacuum.

Does it say anything about me personally that I play this game? Not much more than it would if I played Grand Theft Auto and shot someone in the pursuit of a mission, except that I'm a person who is playing that game. (IE, I don't consider it so disgusting that I've stopped, or anything.) There are also technological limitations to consider, plus I could just... not engage 'barbarian' cities, though they will continue to attack me. However, the creators of the game thought it was fine to create non-autonomous nation states that can act as a threat for a player, and chose to give those non-historical actors (for the intents and purposes of this game) names from real cultures. It doesn't mean the creators of the game are terrible, or anything, just that it doesn't read especially well from that perspective.
My dad picked up Dark Souls for me around Christmas, which was really thoughtful of him because I haven't really bought anything like that for myself in well over a year, now and the last game we got as a household was Mass Effect 3 way back when it actually came out, and that was for Kay. Since Christmas, then, hardly a day has passed that I haven't played for at least an hour or so, and I've got some brief thoughts about it. These really aren't organized in any way, but I think that the game itself is pretty noteworthy, so here's what I've noticed.

When I first started playing, I was messing around with character creation, and I ended up opting for a female character model this time. There really isn't anything sexualizing about the armor in Dark Souls, and I really appreciate that. A character's sex is often impossible to even determine, and Inanna is currently swathed in un-sexy, badass plain chain links. 

The scale of the game is somewhat epic. Fighting more than one monster at a time is almost always dangerous, no matter how powerful you are, many monsters are downright huge, and both combats and environments are frequently precarious. The scale of the levels is huge, and they developers specifically worked on making levels with large differences of vertical height that you can see. The result is surprisingly immersive, and often visually impressive.

Equipment sticks with you a long time. Upgrading is often expensive, and differences of equipment are often differences of type rather than quality. Aside from occasional named pieces (which you will often forgo in exchange for your current weapon), you don't start with a longsword and then find another longsword that's simply better than the one you have. There are few merchants or smiths. They will sell you equipment, but it's a matter of availability - it's not qualitatively better or worse than the occasional drops from enemies (who tend to drop equipment that they personally wear, so their equipment value is predicated on what kind of enemy they actually are).

Dark Souls is 'hard'. I put it in quotes because the game can be technically difficult and bosses are especially tough, but the term 'Nintendo hard' is pretty applicable. Leveling up makes things easier, but problems are usually approachable as puzzles or patterns to recognize and solve. It's possible to lose what you've gained, but it's not that difficult to retrieve it. You will occasionally have to back track or re-do effort, but progress save points aren't unreasonably rare. Basically, yes, Dark Souls can be difficult, but it's not really that difficult.

It does remind me a little of a really old school Dungeons and Dragons game. The levels can be dangerous, there's a story but it's not constantly launched at you from every angle, it's fairly lonely - it's clear you're in a little inhabited and perilous area in a larger world, and the environment is a character. There's a depth of lore that's hidden from you, but comes out in the few characters you meet and item descriptions. Dark Souls is not a pandering game, but what it gives you is interesting and, to me, quite fun. I've spent about 55 hours on it so far - that's the difficulty speaking and the fact that the game feels very large, and I'm not given all that much direction on what I need to be doing or what all these zones on the map are for. There's a lot of exploration and doubling back, but the game is pretty enough that I rarely am bothered by it.

I might talk about it more if I feel like there's anything else to say. I unreservedly recommend it if what I said sounds attractive to you.   
I'm just waiting for my hair to dry so I can run errands and then get it cut. The orange is really streaky and there's nothing I can do to it that doesn't make it look like a rats nest, so it's really time. After it's cut, there'll probably be almost nothing left of the orange, and I'll probably move on to another color, but I should probably let it rest, because it's been different colors since about mid-summer.

I intend to return to Sidereal rules because, to me anyhow, it's entertaining. I enjoy the breakdown, but if I'm not methodical, I just kind of make selections at random for lack of caring. It's really all or nothing with me. Anything worth doing, after all, is worth doing with obsessive meticulousness until you get bored and go back to playing Fallout.

Lately, there's been some pretty intense drama around my friends circle. I know what's good for me, and I stay the fuck out of it due to a fledgling sense of self-preservation. It's the kind of thing that tends to make me feel like a secondary member of an ensemble cast to some kind of quality show with typically low ratings. Like, I obviously have my own spin-off graphic novel or something, because there's plenty of weirdness in my own life, but I'm definitely at the periphery of what's going on. I catch these snippets of conversation, then people ask me obviously loaded questions, and I have to pretend like I don't really know what's going on.

Heh. This kind of thing becomes inevitable, and it's mostly stuff I've learned to deal with a long time ago. How do you deal with unspoken expectations in a relationship, for example? How do you cope with feelings of worthlessness or depression? How do you deal with a broken family structure? What are we doing here? All good questions with no single answer. Frank and I, for example, have two drastically different ways of approaching the world. For him, every problem has a correct solution. I prefer to bend with the situation, coming to terms with it until it blows over, or changing my course. This difference comes up in conversations between he and I pretty much in every frank discussion between the two of us.

I was given a gift card to Target, and I appreciate the sentiment, but I probably would have preferred cash so I could use it to buy groceries, which is pretty much what happens whenever I've given funds to allocate. Target has a lot of stuff, but nothing I really want, except that electronics and personal goods are pretty much the same no matter where you go. This lead me to purchase Street Fighter 4 and spend a pretty good amount of time mucking about with it yesterday and today. I've been reading a lot of books lately and playing a lot of video games, but not doing a lot of writing, so that's probably a sub-par practice at best. But really, I've got a media backlog that it feels wasteful to not do these things. Street Fighter 4, by the by, is a fun game but every time I play it, it really makes me wish they had used cell shading to design the characters. I would have loved that.
I woke up this morning and pretty much immediately did everything I had backlogged for this weekend, besides the bar trip at 8 which, for obvious reasons, cannot be done right now. Yeah! Mail the rent! Go to the bank like a fucking adult! Put away laundry, I guess!

Amusingly, after I wrote the entry on Persona 4, I never went back to finish the game. I do this from time to time - get to the very end, get defeated and say, "I don't care." and then come back months later to breeze through it, watch the end cut scene, and put it on the shelf with. "There, that's all done with." I say. "Maybe I'll come back to it in the future." 

I did that with Persona 3 and I did it with Chrono Cross years ago, but haven't come back to them yet. I know the latter has multiple endings, I  just don't care. Which is becoming, more or less, how I frame most of my media consumption these days, since I can get other media if I don't like it and I have a social life, so I don't have to fuck about with stuff I'm not interested in if I don't want to.*

That's happened fairly recently with the book, Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. It was initially copyrighted in 1934, and starts off during WW1, and that's really all I cared to know. It was recommended by someone very hip while I was quite drunk, and I took it to heart, even going to far as to ask The Jenna to order it for me and have it sent to the library, where I picked it up. 

It is not very interesting.

I feel like, at the time it was written, it was probably pretty impressive, but there was nothing in there that I wasn't already deeply familiar with. It was nihilistic, and it started off portraying the absurdities and horrors of war, then it got in to how the narrator wasn't particular patriotic or brave, and was sleeping with an American nurse while in convalescence and so on, and so forth. There was nothing in there that wasn't done in a more interesting way by Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut. Basically, if it was edgy, I'm inured. The translation is blocky and stiff, which I can't tell is on purpose or just happenstance, but it just means that bereft of a powerful message, it's not even that interesting to read. I got to page 47, it ended up as bathroom reading, and even then was more or less discarded in favor of old Exalted 1E supplements.

Not a good review. Maybe I'm just uncultured. I have to return it on the 9th but I'll probably just do it tomorrow, almost entirely unread. 

I'm playing BioShock again, and I'll probably actually get into it a little deeper. I mean, it's a pretty fun FPS set in an Objectivist underwater city, so even if everyone body and their dog has already reviewed and played it, I still want to make my Ayn Rand jokes.

*Which I definitionally don't.


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