Hey, did I commission an obligatory article on Ye Yellow Paint? I have a memory that’s glitching out right now; I think I got involved when everyone was cross about painted ledges in Tomb Raider. Maybe I wrote about it in a newsletter. Look, time is too short to search your written words to avoid writing more words. It’s obviously quicker to just write. Yes, that’s me, the keyboard athlete who finishes a new article every minute.
I wanted to know if I had changed my mind but as I cannot find the article I have no idea. Then again, perhaps some of you are thinking: “what the fuck does he mean by ‘yellow paint’?” If that is your response, I love you.
Yeah, so, a few days ago, keeping in step with the joyous, festive period, a number of my Bluesky followees were provoked into putting forward a critique or defence of Yellow Paint. I still have no idea where The Bluesky Conflab started and, frankly, time is too short to search for other people’s written words, it’s much quicker to just write. But Yellow Paint is an offshoot of how AAA games have an Augmented Reality Problem™, where a beautifully rendered world gets neon slop pasted all over it. This box is OPENABLE. Pointy, pointy: this pipe has an INTERACTIVE valve. This monster has 20 HITPOINTS hovering over his head. This unremarkable ledge is CLIMBABLE. Ah, but the ledge is different.
An AR overlay is just part of the game, a HUD that overlays the gorgeous world of the sublime. But if someone has painted ledges in the ass-end of the wild to signify they afford purchase, that’s ridiculous. Painted ledges are a sign of the gaming end times. Fuck it, I just googled yellow paint. Apparently it’s IGN to blame, which means I’ve just given them free publicity for churning out Diarrhoea Discourse. But I didn’t link them so ha ha surprise twist.
Thing is, Yellow Paint = AR because people were hatin’ and baitin’ on AR too for the same reason. Oh god, no, I keep getting markers telling me where to go! Imma explorer I wanna use my brain for exploring and shit. Can I turn the AR off? Fuck off Thief 3: Deadly Name loot glint. And I don’t want an inventory! I need to physically look under my armpits to count the rocks I’ve gripped there. THATS GAMIN
I’m making fun of myself here because I never liked the AR or the paint. But it’s a necessary evil, like having to excrete to avoid a shitty death. And indie stuff does this allllll theeee timmmmmmeee, it’s just less noticeable when everything is symbols and representations instead of being Photographic Quality As If Zombie Grandma Was Here In The Room With You Right Now. There’s a reason the shiny orbs are shiny (it’s because they’re magic? please I’ve got a princess to sell you in another castle). Once you start doing away with these things someone will always get confused about what they’re supposed to do. And you know who gets lost more than ever in AAA games these days? ME! That’s what we call a surprise twist. No, the surprise twist is that this isn’t about yellow paint at all.
I get so confused because I don’t even like the games. I know, right, Mr. Electron Dance doesn’t like the games! Plug me into a game like PROXIMATE or Utopia Must Fall and, yeah, I’m all in and I will eat your UI for breakfast. Give me more, feed it to my eyeballs with a fork because I love it. But when I play something like Control, I’m like *sigh* fuck, just tell me where to go, I can’t remember what Dave “Gun” Gunn told me to do, was it fetch the reactor rod from the reactor rod storage to the reactor? I’ve had this problem for a while. It’s just where I am; I’ve retreated from AAAAAgames as I find them a little emotionally overblown. I’m no excite, mate, cannae click with the systems and need to be dragged from A to B. I suppose I’ll eat my words at some point after I sit down in front of a big smackeroo of a game and gasp in a whisper: whoa, pass the salt, I’m going to eat my words.
The good news is that next time it is Annual Yellow Paint day, this article will exist and I’ll be able to look up my thoughts on yellow paint and remember why I don’t have any thoughts on yellow paint.
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the yellow paint discourse is about as pointless as the “is it an immersive sim?” discourse (though the answer for the latter re Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is clearly no; also it has white paint and white scratches and white bird poop instead of yellow paint, along with random flappy bits of cloth to draw your attention to Climbable Things). but in a surprise twist, this comment isnt actually about either of those things.
=============== <— climb here
turns out that comment was about the horror of unclosed html tags! that twist surprised even me.
I was very confused until I realised this was part of some larger social media discussion. Arguments about paint does seem like something that would happen after the culture wars were over, so I’m guessing the separation of old twitter and new twitter has largely been a success.
vfig, I think once upon a time I might have cared about paint but now, after having been through so many revisions of Where The Fuck Do I Go Now, it’s like I’m not wasting the rest of my videogaming life for someone to work out how to avoid marring the world in this way. A videogame world is a designed object, a machinethat must expose affordances.
CA, perhaps your comment puts you into the ‘I love you’ camp as I’ve defined in the second paragraph.
I suppose it would be too naive to suggest just putting a paint toggle in the options menu?
Your thoughts were probably on Twitter, which is all deleted now unfortunately
CA: It’ll be more work to have a whole layer of art “toggleable” and they’ll need to make sure every item of paint on the environment is all toggled on which is more work for QA. On top of that some ppl who turn it off will complain about how they couldn’t find their way around. It’s just lose/lose.
Jono: I have my archive and did search it before writing this! But sadly I couldn’t find it. I do wonder if I imagined it…
I don’t know. That sounds like a pretty good argument against options generally, and yet developers still include them when they deem it worthwhile.
*shrug* I’m not involved in AAA game development but,
versus other options, I feel the risk/reward is hugely skewed on this development. It doesn’t seem cheap and there’s no real payoff in doing this.
I hadn’t heard of yellow paint as such but I had had a thought about it sort of related to Stray which I posted on that thread. Or is this about vaulting the grave? Also maybe I should start a studio to make Kitty Bernband.
I am ridiculously far from AAA games on my silly laptop but everything I’ve read about them suggests that art assets are the really expensive part, so toggling yellow paint does sound expensive. As opposed to grave-vaulting tooltips.
I’m also going to shrug here. I’m certainly not trying to be disagreeable! Although I do, it would appear, disagree. But I’d hope to maintain an agreeable tone while doing so 🙂
I agree that anything that is part of the art budget (such as yellow paint decals) may be expensive, but if we’re operating from the assumption that these are already in the game, a global flag that makes them invisible (or fully transparent) seems comparatively much less expensive. You’d have to test it, yes, but you have to test lots of things. Or, increasingly, you let your players test lots of things for you…
Would the demand for such toggle be big enough to be worth that cost of implementation? I have no idea! I’m only hearing about any of this second-hand. But it sounded like a discussion that got a lot of traction on the social meej, so assuming we’re putting any stock in that, an option that makes both sides of the divide happy seems.. good?
And if we’re not putting any stock in it, then… why are we talking about it? :sweating smile emoji:
Revisiting Vault the Grave was interesting, though. Joel’s position seems to have retained an enviable consistency over the decade. I’m forever being contradicted by my past self.
Revisiting Vault the Grave led me to the post before, on which I left two comments a year and a half apart that sum up my contribution to Electron Dance (“too bad I can’t play this game on a Mac/HEY HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT KNYTT UNDERGROUND?”)