episodechooseyourstory:

Welcome to Episode: your home for interactive, visual stories, where as the player YOU choose what path your character takes!

Oh, you know what this reminds me of? 1-900 numbers from the ‘90s.

(In an era when “long distance” [~ beyond a metropolitan area or so] calls were billed by the minute and heavily, 1-900 numbers used the phone billing system as an intermediary for phone-based services like information and erotic talk to masturbate to. In contrast 1-800 [and later 1-888] numbers were distinguished by being free to the caller, recipient paying all service costs)

Anyway there would be 1-900 services that would be games (compare BBS “door games”) or interactive fictions, and they would advertise on daytime TV, which I speculate had a similar “shut-in” audience to tumblr

I propose that these had more influence on early FMV games than is acknowledged, the transmission to credit-to-continue arcade games like Dragon’s Lair and even Mad Dog McCree (and the tendency of home games to follow arcade lead into the mid-90s, consider the form of “continues” and “lives”) was an important precedent for F2P-style income maximization.

And that the ‘90s academics who creamed themselves over shitty hypertext fiction and MUDs and didn’t even notice this were sillybillies.

1) Centuries after apocalypse Bostonians still speak with Bostonian accents (and Bostonian self-importance, that’s a detail they got really good), the robot Takahashi’s Japanese speech is a subject of discussion, arrivals from outside the Commonwealth are big news, but no one makes note of the Longs’ Chinese or the Bobrovs’ Russian accents.

2) And somewhat related, people have re(invented/discovered) windmills, there are waterways everywhere*, traders and trade routes are the backbone of civilization** but under constant bandit threat, the USS Constitution is right fucking there, but no one thinks to go sailing.

*unlike the desert of 1 and 2, where they had an excuse

**this is why I did what’s apparently unthinkable around here and sided with the Legion in New Vegas - what the Wasteland needs most of all right now is a force to pacify the roads and allow a traders’ empire to consolidate; “imitate the Roman Empire” is not a bad approach; NCR city-state federalism doesn’t scale and would fall to infighting; Yes Man’s Free City New Vegas sounded tempting but not if the opportunity cost is rebuilding civilization.

spacetwinks:

spacetwinks:

i’m laughing so hard at that AC karl marx screenshot holy fuck

like it’s not just funny cuz of the words it’s putting in marx’s mouth, but because they’re happening in a series of games where you are just straight up killing people constantly

assassin’s creed character just stabbing someone in the heart: i see what you mean. violence is not the answer

In AC:Unity the Jacobins were dangerous fanatics taking the Revolution too far… but it turns out it had been a setup from the start, the leaders of the mob manufactured the food shortages that kicked it off because… capitalist democracy is an even more effective mechanism of total social control than feudalism.

(Meanwhile since at least 3 they’ve been playing up the “Templars are on to something when they say Assassin notions of ‘freedom’ and 'self-determination’ are just a cover on thrill-seekers making violent messes of things” angle)

And over in their other AAA open-world franchise, the last 2 Far Cry main series games were about how trying to fight evil and redress wrongs will just lead to bestial violence and self-degradation, how rebels are no better than their oppressors, that a movement fanatical or coldblooded enough to overthrow a tyrant will prove even worse, that nobility has its own charm after all and in combination with competence it’s an alternative worth giving a second look.

Ubisoft plots have been getting hella counterrevolutionary lately.

Chriiiiiist, how many Assassin’s Creed games have I started being all enthusiastic and then been like “ugh, right, the Abstergo frame story”.

Saw a meme being all “ha ha, those kids who made fun of us for playing D&D in high school are playing fantasy football now, and it’s the same thing”.

And I don’t think that’s true, I think the distinction is in narrativization. Even a party of minmaxers on the most perfunctory Monty Haul dungeon crawl experience it as a narrative, if only as “you open the door to the next room, there’s a chest, guarded by a monster, you kill it and loot the chest, repeat”.

Some schmuck might have won the game of the week because Tom Brady’s passing and A.J. Green’s receiving stats put them over even in the face of their opponent getting a lot of points on sacks, but I’ve never seen (admittedly I haven’t looked too hard) that schmuck posting an after-action report where he tells the story of the critical plays where Brady, under pressure in the pocket, was able to connect with Green near the goal-line.

And it’s not like it would be impossible to narrativize things like that - I just did! Hell, actual, honest-to-god sportswriting narrativizes random noise all the time. So the fact that that’s not a draw, or even an expected feature, to fantasy football players strikes me as a significant distinction.

Back in the ‘90s when I was on AOL, I remember for some reason or another coming across a message board full of Microsoft Flight Simulator fans that liked to play “Airline”.

They’d form up into companies (=teams), download their company’s livery, start the game as a passenger jet at a major airport, taxi to the right runway, take off at the rotation speed and flap settings indicated in real-life manuals for that model of plane at an airport of that altitude and temperature, spend hours flying across the country at cruising speed and altitude along designated flight paths, land properly, taxi to the gate, and upload the playback log to be scored for their company.

And the really serious guys would download mods to turn the 737 model into specifically a 737-700 or something like that, and replicate specific cockpit setups with actual physical peripherals at home, and have sound clips ready to trigger in flight for, say, turning the fasten seatbelts light on and off, or declaring yourself upon passing into a new air traffic control zone.

All of this struck me somehow creepier than other fandoms that played with replicating meatspace in games - the people who’d make famous cities in SimCity2000, or their high schools as Doom .WADs. A decade or more before “gamification” - fitting productive capitalist activity to a recreational ruleset - turned into a big thing, it was the exact opposite - playing games according to a model of capitalist productivity.

So the reason I was thinking about Batman and Catwoman was I’ve been playing the new Arkham Knight game. It’s good! After just going off on how the Arkham games have an edge up on GTA by not having any of the (out of style) driving genre in them, the third-to-last thing I expected was for the new one to have Burnout-style driving in it, the second-to-last thing was for it to have Japanese arcade-style tactical tank combat, and the absolute last thing I expected was for them both to work so well.

Also I’m really just appreciating how well the property works for open-world gaming because unlike other games it can easily make an in-universe explanation for all sorts of stuff that’s really a function of games-as-commercial-objects with “Because Batman”. Why is the same protagonist engaging in (and skilled at) melee combat, tool-based puzzles, car combat, aerial maneuvers, and mystery-solving? Because Batman. How do you expect us to buy a plot making all sorts of bounces and turnabouts to justify a bunch of different boss battles? Because Batman. Why are we still supposed to think of this guy as good when he spends the game taking out thousands of faceless mooks? Because Batman. Why are we taking time out to track down all sorts of hidden collectables? Because the Riddler, because Batman.

The one thing though, after 4 of these they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as enemies goes. Consensus is that Batman has the best rogues’ gallery in comics, and further that that’s because so many of them work as twisted reflections of Batman.

To wit, Catwoman’s thing is dressing up in sexy black leather and going off on outside-the-law missions on the rooftops of Gotham; Penguin’s an orphan with a taste for high society; Joker (and to an extent Anarky) is as obsessive about creating chaos as Batman is with order; (Joker and Penguin are also hella fond of themed gadgets;) Scarecrow uses fear as a tool and a weapon; Two-Face has a split personality; Riddler is constantly showing off his supergenius; Mr. Freeze is driven by the memory of personal loss; Man-Bat is, uh.

(Harley Quinn is really a Robin - a sidekick who maintains absolute personal and professional loyalty in the face of how much suffering the role brings. That’s a big theme of this game and I’m surprised they didn’t use her more in it.)

Even the ones that don’t have such thematic resilience make a particular kind of sense for Batman - his “no guns” thing contrasts with Deadshot’s “only guns”; his combination of fighting skill and resilience are matched by Ra’s al Ghul, Bane, and Solomon Grundy. Poison Ivy is odd - plants and poison aren’t really meaningful to Batman, and actual superpowers are kind of peripheral to the Batverse, but what she is really, deadly kiss and all, is a distillation of the femme fatale figure. Recall that Batman is heir to the pulp tradition from which that archetype comes, and that poison is a traditionally female weapon.

But when you’re getting down to Deacon Blackfire and Firefly… well, I guess bats are the natural predators of insects, but “a pyromaniac with a jetpack” is kind of a stretch. I suppose the series has used Killer Croc and Calendar Man (and Mad Hatter, who I give a pass though on what principles I can’t tell) before. At least it’s not Condiment King, I suppose.

Still playing Witcher III. Got me thinking about how 3D open-world sandboxes have all been converging on some sort of all-genres-in-one standard.

You know, combat and climb-based 3D environmental navigation from beat-em-ups; leveling, skill progression, simultaneous quest-based structure and loot from corpses by way of RPGs both C- and A-, simple “mysteries”, dialogue trees, and collecting random objects to assemble into tools from point-click adventures…

But that’s not ALL genres, is it? And I think that’s why granddaddy of the field GTA is starting to show its age - it derives its lineage from different genres: vehicles from racers and flight sims; combat and multiplayer modes from FPSes (rendered, uh, TP); jump-based ascent, self-contained mission structure, character power increasing from weapon powerups and currency objects that spawn on enemy death and get tracked in the HUD from platformers.

Everyone’s sharing their reactions to the FF7 remake.

Mine was “ooooh god, I forgot about Cait Sith, the fuck was up with *that*?”

The Witcher III is not the first CRPG-derived 3d ARPG I’ve played where a questline’s big twist was “actually the guys who seem weird but pleasant in the middle of nowhere *aren’t* cannibals”

Been playing the new Witcher.

Mechanically, it hits the sweet spot between Dark Souls and Dragon Age.

Thematically, it is Polish as hell, holy shit. Most of our RPGs derive their worldbuilding from a British tradition, we actually get a bit of German by way of Japan (lancers, dragoons, 2h knights, one-city realms and threatening emperors and conniving chancellors), Dragon Age was bidding for novelty by doing French.

But this is definitely Eastern European. It’s not just the questlines and bestiary out of Grimm’s and Slavic legend. Part of it is the peasant’s-eye view. There may be great wars and cosmic forces at play but to a significant extent they just account for why a questgiver is in a particular location.

The more common viewpoint expressed is of a peasant - not even in a castle keep! in scattered villages and hamlets! varying from squalor to bucolic! according to their economic position! as you can tell from the actual productive activity the environment and animation design dramatizes! - who just desires that as few of his fellows suffer and die as possible.

Witcher got some knocks for having such a monoethnic world, especially by comparison to DA, because of course it did. But I think both routes *work*, creatively - DA only showed you a thimbleful of villages and two blocks of a capital city and called it a great civilization, venue for ageless deeds, and the range of accents and skin tones and styles helped sell that.

In contrast, just the *sameness* of Witcher, these dirty poor farmers and THESE dirty poor farmers, you can have a much bigger world but it still leaves the machinations of kings coming off as detached and pompous, and the dirt where you work as the *real* world.

And you want to talk races, human/nonhuman racism is the in thematic in “gritty” fantasy these days, but a lot of games play that as a supercharged version of the refugee/immigrant experience - you live in the REALLY bad quarter of town, and people stand around in public having conversations about how TERRIBLE you are, or walk through your streets for the SOLE purpose of calling you names.

Because I suppose even the most branched multi-release choice-consequence tree has a hard time making a dramatic antagonist out of a guy being polite and charming in working with you and then going home and spending three decades NOT spending energy on your behalf to upset a settled order that has already been mythologized as proper and on which he and worthy institutions he values materially depend.

But the Witcher, yeah, this clearly comes from a culture that KNOWS a thing or two about how ethnic conflict in a feudal society works. There’s a bit in the playroom zone with a dwarven blacksmith that does it great. People will know you’re different, but they’ll accept you as part of the community. But know you’re different.

And when things get stressful they might link you to the stresses. And want to take it out on you. And convince other people they gain from your loss.

But wait, there WILL be people that value you. Authorities that will protect you, put your contribution to the community above petty bigotry.

But authority - whether established or upstart-aspirant - has enemies, and if those enemies either win, or the authority ever needs to buy their favor cheap…

Other than that, I like the pulpiness of it all - it clearly comes from the kind of book that could be described as “rollicking”. A ridiculously OP protagonist - magical Han Solo Batman, basically - threading a plot advanced by femme fatale teases, with eventual consummation… James Bond was pulp.

Pulp - stories that just exist as off-the-shelf daydreams, no higher pretensions - I dig pulp.

vgjunk:

Typing of the Dead, PC.

1) BioWare does a good job with their worldbuilding in drawing just enough from real history that players can bring some baseline knowledge to the table to fill in gaps, while making the specific sources obscure enough, and kinking the end result enough, to leave space for novelty. Like how the setting is not just Fake Middle Ages but specifically Fake *French* Middle Ages, or how Andraste, “Bride of the Maker” is a conflation of Jesus and Muhammad, with Judas’ betrayal setting the stage for the Fitnas and the Sunni/Shiite split.

2) I like the handling of healing, all on to the limited but freely refillable single type of healing potions, upgradeable in number and power. It means that the felt experience of gating map areas by enemy difficulty went from being wiped out by a single enemy and sent to last save point to having a series of victories “cost” too much resulting in the “decision” to fast-travel back. Same ultimate effect but much less tedious and unpleasant. (plus evading all the inventory management shit, I don’t know how long I’ve spent in Spiderweb games consolidating and redistributing potions) It’s like the RPG equivalent of the FPS innovation of regenerating health.

3) More sympathy than I expected for the people giving them shit for their yay diversity treatment of gender/sexuality. “Shoving it down our throats” isn’t right, but they do noticeably drop their standards for the sake of putting it in there. No comment on the charge that straight romances available to men suck - I’m playing as a bi woman, as one does. But the two times they put gender/sexuality stuff front and center - Dorian and his dad, drinking with Bull and Krem’s gender identity - feel like those G.I. Joe PSAs, bracketed off from the rest of the story, with an earnestness that’s at odds with the tone and characterization elsewhere.

And I mean BioWare’s still competent, so it’s not terrible, just substandard. That Bull would accept Krem as a man is believable - as he says, his band’s a bunch of misfits and there’s a lot weirder shit taken for granted in this world. That he would so earnestly and firmly deliver The Message instead of smilingly busting balls over it like he does everything else… nah. And that your conversation options range from enthusiastic agreement to friendly curiosity, in a game that usually offers cynicism and hostility (at the expense of good relations) and otherwise presents sympathetic presentations of multiple views on genocide, slavery, totalitarian collectivism, and the prophylactic killing of innocents… it stands out.

Dorian’s more believable - that there might be some emotion and trauma under that insouciance, I buy it. But his situation just shows how the devs are trying to have their cake and eat it too - crafting a fantasy of a world where sexuality doesn’t matter (as infodumped in the Sexuality in Thedas codex) and then stretching to rig up scenarios for you to triumph over retrograde opinions anyway. Just like they make a world where no one comments how Fake France is populated with a random assortment of Irish- to Ethiopian-looking folks, and then bring in the Dalish to Explore the Issue of Racism.

I’ll live. But like I’ve said before, however well-intentioned this shit really comes off like “‘90s attitude” Poochieism sometimes.

I’m playing DA:I and realizing that the notions of aggro and tanking might be the MMORPG’s most distinctive contribution to gaming. You got it showing up in 1p here, you had it in that one edition of D&D. (The grid miniatures one, I think. After the open source one, before the one that gave everyone per-encounter spells.)

Game’s fun. The autopilot MMORPG-style battle is sorta like FFXII. There’s actually a lot - the music, the costume design, the environment design - that somehow comes awfully close to Square house style without ever actually evoking it, can’t quite put my finger on it.

The obvious comparison would be to Skyrim but I noticed more the difference, and the way that lined up with their maker’s house styles, each one playing to their narrative strengths - BioWare in dialogue, with thoroughly branched conversations and memorable party members riffing off each other; Bethesda in scene-setting, rigging up little tableaux that told tales by implication.

And suffering from their mechanical weaknesses - the fact that Bethesda doesn’t so much have a game engine as a stats engine on speaking terms with a 3d animator, while 6 games into its console era BioWare still can’t craft a reasonable equipment menu.

Well, good on ‘em.

So as far as open-world AAA vidya goes, Rockstar’s brand is now “naturalistic American nostalgia” and Ubisoft’s is “hyperreal international realism” and that’s interesting

Oh man I just had the most ridiculous dream. I was playing a new one of those “LEGO (X)” games. I guess it was “LEGO City” but it was really “LEGO Millennial Life”.

First thing you’d do in a new zone is climb a building to build a cell tower, that’d let you use your smartphone to get tasks.

(Your smartphone was a 1x2 flat graphic tile, also there was a visual joke once where someone’s phone was the old handheld black walkie talkie piece.)

You’d use an app to find dates, who would all turn out crazy in some funny way. You’d get jobs, like, you might have to build a cafe and then work there as a barista.

When you’d completed all the tasks and built all the stuff in a zone it would be fully gentrified and you couldn’t afford the rent so you’d move on to the next one, that was a cute touch.

I keep going back and forth on AC: Unity.

It’s World of Assassin’sCreedcraft, with the SP mode as a spinal solo questline that gives you decent greens and blues then purples. But past that loot-grindable instances and parallel and semifungible progression systems and everything.

Destiny was World of Halocraft and AC:U did it better, half of GTAV was WoGTA and AC:U integrated the sides better, on the other hand Diablo III was More Diablo II and that didn’t happen so. So.

Also the French Revolution, they did even more than you could expect.

the AC3 lineage, 3-Black Flag-Rogue, I liked that. More wilderness, more stealth timing. ubisoft says okay let’s see that work out in Batman: Arkham and Shadow of Mordor’s lineage, let’s split another branch off from early Ezio and make it WoAC and I’ll give them a chance.

The thing with Polygon and Kotaku renouncing review embargos, and going in on Ubisoft over AC:Unity, and retroactively downgrading Destiny… that’s brilliant, and I bet most people don’t even make the connection to hashtag Gamergate.

They finally did what they should’ve, took a step back from the fray to calm down and plot how to turn the whole thing to their advantage. And if they pull it off they could actually come out stronger from the whole thing. They’ve already earned the indie devs’ loyalty from acting as their champion, and their media compatriots for championing their prerogatives against the unwashed masses (I expected Salon to jump onside because obviously, but seeing the fucking London Review of Books do it first and harder was an eyeopener). Now by actually jiujitsuing “ethics in game journalism” to reposition themselves as champions of their alienated audience, and using it as a club to extract concessions from the AAA studios - well, if they pull it off that’s pretty much running the table right there.

They’ll cool down on the SJW “muh intersectionality in vidya” beat, you mark my words. Maybe poke the hornets’ nest for attention every now and then, but the free ride is over and now they know that costs them more than it pays off. They’ll just quietly commission less and less of that stuff. They’ll never make a public show of contrition, that was never in the cards, that’s not how Gawker and its bastard children roll, that’s never been how they roll.

Nick Denton’s brilliant stroke, going all the way back to Gawker’s origins as Gawker Stalker, was to not even make pretense to the American tradition of Sulzbergerian evenhanded postwar monopoly journalism, but to go the British competitive no holds barred venomous one, all taking shots at each other, stirring up witch hunts to boost circulation. It’s been like that for a long time, where multiple outlets are in competition for the same national readership - that’s where 1984’s “prolefeed” and “Two Minutes Hate” come from. That’s why Milo Yiannopoulos, from the British system himself, was the one landing all the hardest blows on the other side of this fight.

I mean, it’s interesting. It’s interesting, and I like living in interesting times, but there’s a reason that phrase comes from a backhanded blessing - as a way to run a culture it’s fucking dangerous, it leads to pillarisation. The Dutch model - Protestant/Catholic/secular social democrat - is safe enough with the European confessional wars well behind us, but the 19th and early 20th century models, where the pillars could be “monarchist” or “communist” or “fascist”, (or even the pre-20th century American party-affiliated yellow press), that was fucking dangerous. Journalists talked their countries into war, into revolution, to boost their numbers and make their names. There’s a reason British libel law is so strict, and that’s to create some leverage to tamp things down when they start stepping on toes that matter.

I mean hell, we’re on course for a full-blown constitutional crisis in a decade or two in no small part because Murdoch imported the British model.

The cowled jacket (Assassins Creed)

The Red Dot Sight (CoD)

The particular angle of attack of the ’80s comeback (Grand Theft Auto: Vice City)