Electron Dance Highlights
Faith of the Pilgrim
This is everything I have to say on Alexander “Droqen” Martin's Starseed Pilgrim. If you don’t want to be spoiled, read last week’s The Five Stages of Starseed Pilgrim instead.
This is it, people, this is enormo-spoilers. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
The Accidental ARG
When they tell you that you are gorgeous and amazing, you wonder if it's not you at all but the butterfly effect. Maybe they have fallen in love with the synergy of a Zeitgeist moment and you are merely the object of misplaced affections. So you do something that looks backwards, something that tries to clone that superstar attention. We are all human.
The Aspiration remains one of the best pieces of writing you will find on Electron Dance. It is a detailed journal of my struggles in a game of Neptune's Pride, covering not just strategy but alien role-play and flirtation with a game-induced nervous breakdown. But once the series was done in 2011, the traffic did not stick around and for the rest of that year I could not shake off the feeling that I had slipped silently from internet wannabe to internet has-been.
I had some ideas for essays that extended The Aspiration and decided in 2011 Q4 to run a spin-off series. During the original series, The Aspiration had revealed they were heading for Earth so for the spin-off The Aspiration would finally reach Earth then hack Electron Dance. Also running it over Christmas might be a win in terms of traffic because most sites stop updates during the holidays. Thus The Xmaspiration was born. It sounded awesome, almost as awesome as alien vampires.
I attempted to hype it up before the series launched except... I created something monstrous. Something I lost control of. What I envisioned as a harmless bit of fun mutated into a full-blown ARG, an alternate reality game.
This is the story of that accidental ARG and how it destroyed Christmas.
The Ethics of Selling Children
I had finished writing a mail to Ed Key, the developer of Proteus, and the pointer hovered over the Send button. I proofread the mail a couple of times and everything looked good. It was time to click the button.
But I hesitated. Even though the wording was perfect, something was wrong. Doubting myself, I leaned away from the monitor and nudged the pointer off Send.
It did not take me long to realise the stupidity of what I was about to do. Twenty minutes in the making, I deleted the mail in less than a second.
This is a story about confession.
A Slave Obeys
Arkane Studios' Dishonored skidded onto the scene last week, a game that echoes Looking Glass Studios' seminal Thief although sports skill upgrades a la Deus Ex. Inevitably there was both great praise ("awesome") and great disappointment ("short").
Over on Minnesota Daily, Simon Benarroch wrote how Dishonored lets us down because it doesn't encourage the player to take advantage of all the skills and items on offer. An interesting argument in itself, one I've considered before with other games; what good are all these wonderful toys if players do not use them?
But Benarroch then confuses the situation:
It wanted so badly for you to have all the options all the time that you never really had to stop and think. Because you can do everything exactly the way you want to, it becomes clear once again that you aren't really creating your own narrative, but playing someone else's.
Blink, blink.
Because you can play exactly the way you want to, you aren't creating your own narrative.
I've spent five hours on Dishonored so far and only just started the second mission of the game. I’m being Thief-style thorough and will definitely not finish in the standard ten hours, a figure derided as “too short”. So I admit I’m not approaching this topic from the perspective of experience.
Nonetheless, my reaction to Benarroch's essay was this: What?
Rehabilitation
In the last few minutes I completed The Adventures of Shuggy and –
Wait, are you still there? Did you click away already? Okay, bye.
You probably won't miss anything.
Drowned
If it takes me half a year to play through Far Cry 2, it means the breadth of my gaming experiences over that period are diminished. I have GTA IV sitting on Steam and I don't even want to touch it. Skyrim is a definite no-no. Dark Souls flirts; I shrug my cold shoulders.
Electron Dance ideas need to come from somewhere; if you play just one long game, you're resigned to writing about it for a long time. “Oh God, HM, do you really think the internet needs any more writing on Mass Effect?”
Short-form games seemed to be a way of avoiding this trap. I thought of how much theoretical ground could be covered with diverse five-minute game bites rather than multi-month meals. I shouldn't have to wait for the moon to change phase before playing something else (mentioning no names Sword & Sworcery) and some of these small flings can lead to all sorts of interesting chatter.
But actions have unforeseen consequences. Do the same thing again and again… and you can end up scarring yourself with strange behavioural patterns that are difficult to resolve.
A Weaponized Machine
November 23, 2010. Quintin Smith posts about a free browser game called The Infinite Ocean on Rock Paper Shotgun. I plan to dabble with it but stay for the duration. Jonas Kyratzes is easy to find in Google, easier than Mr. Mxyzptlk. I hammer him into my RSS feeds and lurk in his comments.
A Letter to Nicolau Chaud (NSFW)
The following article is about Nicolau Chaud's sex game Polymorphous Perversity; it is most definitely NSFW, contains spoilers through to the game's ending and discusses sexual violence.
Proceed with caution.
Dear Nicolau,
We've been friends for nearly two years now, since I wrote about Marvel Brothel and, well, indirectly got Marvel to take legal action against the RMN site. Yay me.
Since then, we've traded observations and thoughts on game design and the nature of development. Nonetheless, having a great back catalogue saves no developer from the box-office bomb or the magnum opus that pisses off the fans. With the months ticking by, I was anxious about the ongoing development of your sex game Polymorphous Perversity, passing from the realms of hobby project to obsession. The more hype the project received, the more likely it would disappoint.
I know you've been anxious to hear my thoughts, so I'll start with this: you set yourself up to fail.
The Academics Are Here
This is the final article in the series The Academics Are Coming.
In the 1970s, the term “Cycle of Deprivation” entered British political nomenclature.
It was a hypothesis asserting that disadvantage was cyclical and persistent across generations. The children of “troubled families", it suggested, would be condemned to repeat their parent's mistakes and inflict the same disastrous upbringing on their own children.
The important thing to note about this hypothesis is its focus on problem families rather than poverty. This is a crucial point as researchers have shown that poverty does beget poverty but the “cycle of deprivation” hypothesis has been rejected - disadvantaged children can rise above their “troubled” origins without external support.
Yet this hypothesis is continuously regurgitated, framed to fit the political narrative of the moment. From “The Cycle of Deprivation: Myths and Misconceptions”:
This means that alongside the focus on social exclusion, child poverty, and inter-generational continuities in economic status, there is a parallel and increasing emphasis on anti-social behaviour, parenting, and problem families. Arguably what comes over most strongly from a review of the past 30 years is the persistence of dichotomies – between continuity and discontinuity; between intra-familial and extra familial factors; between social scientists and psychologists; between research and policy; and between individuals and institutions. Overall, the result of the neglect of this important part of recent intellectual history is that several wheels are being regularly reinvented.
Recently, the UK government launched an initiative to tackle “troubled families” using a report by Louise Casey as a touchstone. This report makes no reference to thirty years of research, relying instead on a series of interviews and admits “that this is not formal research… these interviews [are] not representative of the 120,000 families that are deemed as ‘troubled’”.
Being ignored and, occasionally, belittled is part of academic culture; it is not unique to game studies.
A Theoretical War, Part 3
This is the third article in The Academics Are Coming series.
7. insurgency
"Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end they'll beg us to save them."
Bob Page on the Second Ludology/Narratology War (Deus Ex)
Today, anyone and his granny can make a game and a new breed of street developer has emerged. Some of these new designers see the prevailing game paradigms as too constricting. Why the need to win or lose? What is the point of points?
Tale of Tales' Michaël Samyn views the conventional single-player experience as nothing more than a "test" and, a couple of years ago, he proposed the notgames "design challenge" – something he refuses to call an agenda or a movement. He wanted to encourage developers to put aside goal-directed play and aspire to make art with games.
Despite opposing notions of ludology, Samyn's restatement of the single-player formula as a test is a classic ludological, reductionist argument - tear away the shallow exterior, and you are left with nothing but naked hoops to jump through. And just like ludologists, Samyn is interested in crafting significant, unique work in the medium of games. Take a look at these "opposing viewpoints" on Myst:
Espen Aarseth in 2004: “Most critics agree that the Miller brothers succeeded eminently in making a fascinating visual landscape, a haunting and beautiful gameworld, but to experienced gamers, the gameplay was boring and derivative, with the same linear structure that was introduced by the first Adventure game sixteen years earlier. Nice video graphics, shame about the game.”
Michaël Samyn, the Notgames Fest 2011 keynote: “Why had people not realized that most of us were playing Myst for its world and its stories, and not the arcane puzzles?”
Aarseth and Samyn both make the same point, differing only in emphasis. Aarseth sees failure, but Samyn sees inspiration. Ludology says games are based on mechanics and goals; the notgames perspective calls goals and challenge out as clichés that hobble the greatest of video game art.
A Theoretical War, Part 2
This is the second article in The Academics Are Coming series.
4. defection
In 1998, Jesper Juul presented a paper titled "A Clash between Game and Narrative" at the Digital Arts and Culture conference, based on his ongoing postgraduate research. He asserted that narrative was not just unimportant in games but actually burdensome. Games and narrative were "two phenomena that fight each other" and attempts to merge them would inevitably "zigzag" between the two.
Juul also demonstrated that narrative ended up as digital paint which is a similar to an argument put forward by Brian Moriarty in last year's GDC and also here on Electron Dance:
"I illustrated this [using] a silly platformer with background art by Michelangelo, dialog from Shakespeare, characters from Ingmar Bergman movies and music by Bach... but it was still just a platformer... [Such games] may have an arty veneer, and explore important topics and themes, but it's all bolted on to familiar game mechanisms that are not essentially synergistic."
Clearly both men take issue with propositions like One and One Story (referenced last week) but I found some of Juul's arguments oddly anachronistic. It was published when game story was becoming more and more important to players and 1998 was notable for being the year that Half-Life blew everyone away. Players were no longer shooting blocks and dodging pixel balls; they were sweating and surviving in Black Mesa, fighting their way out of a catastrophe, trying to piece together what had gone so wrong. Was Juul swimming against the tide?
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- Forget that Norton guy; it's The Laffer Utilities Ver. 4.01!Nowadays nobody seems to remember neither them PC Tools nor those over-priced Norton Utilities we all used to install in order to have our PCs actually come close to doing stuff, and I frankly do not particularly miss this part of the era. On the other hand, you can't really complain when you are 14, even if the only Sierra product you can afford are t […]
- The Oculus Rift is (probably) here to staySome quick thoughts. A little over a year ago I wrote a short, half-baked thing for Infinite Lives, Why “virtual reality” will never catch on. Now, fewer than 400 days later, my little treatise already seems outdated and quaint. Oh, sure, the crux of my argument remains true: there is virtually (hah! Virtually) no way […]
- Ultima III in PicturesThere’s a lot of interesting stuff to talk about in Ultima III, to the extent that I wasn’t quite sure how to wedge it all into a conventional review. So I decided to try this approach, to balance my usual telling with quite a bit of showing. Or something like that. Anyway, I found it […]
- Roundup #? of ?I’ve been horribly failing at writing blog posts lately, so I thought I’d throw myself something of a slow ball and just write briefly about the different projects I find myself engaged in at the moment. At the very least it can serve as some kind of “in this day in history I was doing […]
- How are you?So, my dental surgery didn’t go so well. I have a giant gaping wound in my mouth, a tooth with a hole in it that should have been fixed, no way of eating, trouble closing my mouth properly, and a surplus of anger, disappointment and despair. But what about you? Seriously, what about you? I […]
- Nick Trujillo Presents: Skyward Collapse Comic Page 3The third page of Nick Trujillo's comic is now up! Here are page one and page two if you missed them. Two more pages are in the works, which will be released periodically leading up to the release of Skyward Collapse on the 23rd -- that's this Thursday. Enjoy! […]
- House of the Dead: Overkill"Two dick-wielding cop cliches": it's either a sitcom or an on-rails shooter. Hopefully both. […]
- May 19thWelcome to another exciting Sunday filled with the best and brightest of videogames journalism, criticism and commentary! We’re a little late, so let’s not dally a second more. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging! HOW WE PLAY John Brindle, the most British brother of the American Midwest Brindle Clan, went to GameCamp again this year …Read more → […]
- Quizzical Play #3: Gamecamp 2013Last year I went to Gamecamp. This year I went again. But this time, I ran my own session, delivering a twelve-minute speech on my ideas about 'quizzical play' to a bunch of people who were kind enough to come and listen. Here is a recording of that talk, as well as my notes, from which I read almost verbatim.You can listen to the talk on Soundclou […]
- Saturday Spotlight: Mustache ArmiesThe first instalment of a new series presents the most fun you can have with a game in thirty minutes. […]