Tamrielo

Tam Suggests: Kentucky Route Zero

May 26, 2015May 12, 2015 by Tamrielo

Some of the best games I’ve played recently have been recommended to me by other people. I know my tastes, and I’m pretty proactive about finding games I know I’ll like, and as a result I tend not to listen to the games people suggest for me. A few things slip by, usually stuff that isn’t in my usual wheelhouse, and I usually get them from other people or the occasional errant thing I read on the web.

I’d like to add a feature where I suggest games I’ve played that I think are worth looking into for one reason or another. These will be “Tam Suggests” games, and I’ll be following up with another feature called “Tam Tries” which will be more of a standard review, done my way.

I’ll lead these off with a disclaimer: The game I suggest here are worth playing. This doesn’t necessarily make them good, and I don’t necessarily think everyone will like them. I’ll talk about why I think they’re worth playing, but don’t expect a lot of hard criteria-checking. In a review, I’ll be looking at the game holistically. For the Suggests series, I’m going to be focused on a small number of reasons that, despite its flaws, the game is worth your time.

Let’s start with one that’s been lodged in my brain for a few years now. Here we go.

Kentucky Route Zero is a weird game. Aggressively, intensely weird. So weird it’s able to drive the casual observer far away.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of the best examples of art in videogames I’ve ever seen.

The premise is very, very simple. You are a deliveryman, driving through Kentucky and trying to get to your last stop of the night, and you’re fairly far away. On your way, you find yourself taking a supernatural shortcut, a mysterious route called Route Zero, or just “the Zero” by those in the know.

It’s played like an old-style point-and-click adventure game, and you move around solving puzzles and exploring, seeing the sights and pushing ever onwards towards your goal. You meet interesting people who’re going the same way you are, and sometimes make friends. The whole thing is done in an almost impressionistic art style, shadow play and simple shapes hinting at what’s there, rather than showing you outright. Here’s the trailer, see for yourself:

Things get weird pretty fast. Then they get really weird, even faster. I have a pretty high threshold for strange, so it didn’t really faze me, but I’ve spoken to people who’ve tried the game and couldn’t handle how strange it gets. I don’t think it’s nonsensical, it’s just a little bit sideways, and the logic of Route Zero is more Through The Looking-Glass than you might expect, complete with weird, non-Euclidean geometries.

It’s worth playing for the art alone, but the sound design deserves a mention (in fact, its sound design has won awards). It flits between the dreamlike and the ominous, but keeps the running theme of “it’s late and it’s lonely out here on the road” going strong. I’ve commented before that there’s no alone like 5am, and KRZ captures that feeling very well.

It’s got great visuals and music, though that’s not why I think it’s worth playing. It’s worth playing because it does some very creative things with game narratives that only games can do. A lot of games, even very beloved ones, imitate movies for their storytelling; one-sided projections of the story to the audience. Kentucky Route Zero appears to do that until the first time you talk with an NPC. It shows you what to prepare for by introducing your dog.

It’s a simple, apparently meaningless choice. When you pick a name for the dog, a short blurb about the dog’s personality follows, and for the rest of the game, that’s the dog’s name and personality. Later, it comes up again, only you already know the dog’s name and whether or not the dog is friendly towards other people you meet is no longer your choice.

It’s a really simple concept as shown here, but it slowly gets deeper. When talking to NPCs, I can pick which conversation options tell which parts of the story I want to tell. It gets more complicated when I’m getting to choose what both sides of the conversation are saying, or even what multiple people in my slowly growing party have to say and when. Who interrupts whom, and who’s quiet while the others talk?

Eventually people will ask about your motivations, and this can lead into entire varied asides and different sorts of paths and conversations based on what you choose to say. At one point, I was helping set up a TV for someone, and at a certain point I could reminisce in a couple different ways about my parents and how they felt about TVs, or I could brusquely say “I know how to set up a TV”. I chose the latter, favoring action and displays of competence, and I was able to set up the TV without help. Later, a similar conversation came up and I opted to comment about my background as a mechanic and fix what needed fixing, rather than talking about it. The min-maxer in me enjoyed being able to just be good at whatever I wanted to say I was good at.

Some time later, two of the characters talked about how standoffish and aloof I’d been as Conway, and that control over the conversation came up again. I could have them argue, or mutually decide they didn’t like Conway, or show compassion.

As the game unfolds, you see more and more of the surrounding story– the colour gets filled in, if you will, but which colours you see vary based on your choices. It tells a very complex, winding story, but does so in a way that lets you explore it– not just the physical space, but the relationships with the characters.

It’s not for everyone, and it takes some excruciatingly weird turns, but the way in which it’s presented is really interesting, and I find myself looking forward to new chapters so that I can see where the story goes –where I can take it– next. It’s an experience I can’t really have outside games, and it shows off what the medium is capable of.

It may not be your cup of tea, but I think it’s worth a look.

Source: Digital Initiative
Tam Suggests: Kentucky Route Zero

A Follow-The-Money Problem

May 26, 2015May 10, 2015 by Tamrielo

Games journalism. It’s not really about ethics. It’s about money. Shocker, I know.

You can get to the heart of almost any organization’s strengths, weaknesses, issues, and successes by following the money. If you’re looking for motivation of almost any business, follow the money. Specifically, figure out where the money is coming from and where it’s going. If there’s something happening that you don’t like, it’s probably because you are not the part of the group that’s the primary contributor of money to the organization in question.

If you’re looking at a company that’s doing things that you don’t like, things that fundamentally don’t align with your interests, it’s pretty likely that you’re not the target audience (and thus not giving them any money) or you’re not the customer, you’re the product. You can rail against this, but no matter how loud you get, it’s not going to change unless the flow of money changes.

The common saying is that money is the root of all evil, which I honestly find to be something of a cop-out. Everyone needs to pay the bills, keep the lights on, keep food on the table, and keep a roof over their heads. These aren’t easy things to do. If you’re looking at a professional games journalism site, something that posts multiple times a day (every other hour? more?) and that you can rely upon for coverage of a large number of events, you’re looking at someone, usually quite a few someones, who need to make enough money to essentially spend all day posting. Odds are good you don’t pay a dime to any games site– most don’t even give you the option. So, you’re looking at something you consume for free, that takes up someone’s entire workday, who needs to pay the bills somehow. Follow the money.

If you’re not paying, someone is, or no one would be writing. So, who would want to give someone money to write about games? First, advertisers, though too many ads and you, the reader, won’t read the site anymore, so getting all your money from ads isn’t likely. Second, game publishers, who want people to know about their games and know that games sites are a good marketing platform. Both of these groups have money and motivation. This is all pretty obvious, but it’s where the whole “ethics” question gets thrown into the mix.

Is there a conflict of interest when it comes to accepting money directly from the people you are reporting on? Certainly. Pretty much every type of enthusiast press deals with this. Why? Well, what’s the alternative? Gotta keep the lights on somehow, gotta keep food on the table. The relationship pretty much has to run this way because otherwise you don’t have the money to keep the site up. Does this absolve the enthusiast press of the conflict of interest? No, but “real journalism” is going to take a backseat to “paying the bills” any day of the week. Because it’s enthusiast press and not life-and-death reporting, there’s no value in martyring yourself to report on “big issues” because this is entertainment media; “big issues” pretty much don’t exist.

There’s an alternative model that’s been suggested for games reporting sites: Webcartoonists. The vast majority of webcartoonists don’t sustain themselves on their comic alone; it’s a very rare few who can focus exclusively on their work, and they’re almost all solo endeavours. They also post, at most, once a day, usually less often than that. Not counting sponsored posts and reposts, Kotaku posted ten times today (Sunday, May 10). Destructoid posted 11 times. MassivelyOP, a niche site, posted 9 times today. BlizzardWatch, an even more niche site than Massively, posted 7 times. It’s not a coincidence that those numbers are all really close to one another. While a webcomic can update once a day or less to remain relevant, a games site needs to update multiple times a day– in some cases upwards of ten(!) to stay relevant– that’s where the market equilibrium is happening. The model doesn’t seem to work.

I originally planned on making a graph to show this off, comparing today’s pageviews to the number of posts made. Pageviews are relevant because that’s what gets people to see the advertisements and the marketing that funds the site. Your eyes looking at these sites is the traffic that drives revenue (you are the product). However, the divide between games sites is pretty stark. The readership of sites with 10 or more posts versus the readership of sites with less than 10 posts in a given day is STARK. We’re talking orders of magnitude here, it makes for a silly looking graph. I don’t have a complete picture of the data to support this, but I strongly suspect that if a site updated, say, 15 times a day, they wouldn’t see a significant increase past about 10 or so posts. I do have some supporting data, however.

IGN.com updated 32 times this past Sunday. Here’s their Alexa rank:

IGN.com, Alexa ranking

For comparison, here’s Kotaku, with less than a third of their post count:

kotaku.com, Alexa ranking

As a final point, here’s the Escapist, with 4 posts:

escapistmagazine.com, Alexa ranking

These are all pan-media outlets with a focus on gaming. They all have relatively similar curves, with a spike of readers in the last quarter of 2014 and then some levelling off, and all taking a dive in April (as news hits the doldrums). The Escapist is notably even more pan-media than Kotaku, but Kotaku is right in the 500-700 rank, whereas the Escapist is between 4000 and 5000; an order of magnitude. IGN only gains 300 or so rank over Kotaku, a fairly meager gain in absolute terms, particularly for triple the output. I’m not suggesting that post count is the only (or even necessarily the most important) factor in readership, but there’s definitely a correlation, and all of these sites are posting FAR more than once a day or a few times a week.

The difficulty is finding a model that supports the interests of the audience while providing enough income to support the sites themselves. It seems unlikely that readers are going to be willing to pay for access to games news sites– the current games news sites are the old game magazines, which almost wholly died out with the advent of the internet. The audience was more than happy to become the product in return for getting content for free.

Cory Doctorow in his hot air balloon

The other model I’ve seen is the very egalitarian, very grassroots “bloggers can be the new games journalists”, suggesting that the content created by bloggers, in aggregate, can cover the news and be honest and reader-oriented about it because there’s no real money in it for them. It’s the same concept that drives the idea of twitter-as-international news. I’m not sure if it can work; the idea of crowdsourced reporting is still really young and I suspect there will be barriers to entry put in place by both existing games sites (who want exclusive coverage) and game publishers themselves (who want to be able to control what people say about them). It’s definitely a problem with the Youtube scene by most reports– people either allow themselves to be bought or are shut out.

I’m not sure what the future of games reporting is going to look like, but I think the first place to look to see where it’s headed is the flow of money. You can boil a lot of things down to a follow-the-money problem, and if you figure out how that flow is working, you can get a picture of how it’s likely to change and what would need to be different to get what you’re looking for.

I suspect that a site with no advertising, that charged a $10/month subscription fee and managed to get a critical mass of readers would deliver some really top-notch reporting, but I also doubt there are enough people willing to pay for that.

Source: Digital Initiative
A Follow-The-Money Problem

Luck

May 26, 2015May 8, 2015 by Tamrielo

Luck is believing you are lucky.

It’s a pithy quote, but one that’s resonated with me, and I think is deeper than it first appears. I have been described as lucky, and from a cosmic standpoint, I am. I won the character creation die roll at birth and have been gifted with a great deal of opportunity throughout my life.

At the same time, I’ve known a great many people who have had the same opportunities and gifts as I have and have failed to do much with them. Often, this is a result of a cascade of events that leaves them rather worse off than they started– a “string of bad luck”. I joke with friends about bad luck (I’ve commented about how my luck in games is awful unless I stand a chance of harming someone else’s experience through a random string of good luck, at which point it happens a lot), but the reality is I don’t actually believe in bad luck.

Luck, for me, is something you can only see in hindsight. After something has happened, you can look back on it and say “wow, that was lucky”. Much of the good fortune I’ve had in my life I can look back and say “oh, huh, that was lucky” in hindsight. Luck isn’t a safety net; you can’t live expecting things to go well for you because when they inevitably don’t, everything will fall apart because it’s easy to get into a cascade failure if you’ve left things to chance and have no real safety nets.

image from the new york times

I use luck as a way to appreciate good things that have happened to me that I wasn’t a direct part of, and to clear my mind about the bad things that have occurred that I’ve had no control over. It lets me better understand what I should take credit or responsibility for and what I shouldn’t. It helps me keep my cool and keep a clear head in a crisis.

To use a recent, low-impact example: In the Infinity tournament I played recently, I suffered what some might call a string of bad luck in the second round, losing more than half my force in my opponent’s first turn, to a single model that cut a bloody swathe through my lines, and then getting heavily locked down. My opponent commented later that he was intimidated by how calm I was as I lost almost every single one of my critical pieces. The reality was that I was rapidly trying to figure out what to do next as I lost die roll after die roll, but I was confident that my choices had been correct ones and my dice failing me wasn’t something I could control. Instead, I focused on my turn, and what actions I was going to take in response. It gave me a clarity of purpose that was entirely separate from the die rolls I was losing.

photo courtesy of Toadchild

By the end of my second turn, I’d won the round, despite suffering crippling losses and barely scratching the paint on my opponent’s force– I think he lost perhaps a single model in the entire round. I could have easily gotten caught up in how bad my luck had been (and falling into the trap of assuming it would continue), or started taking reckless chances with low odds of success (something I’ve seen a lot of people do when put in tight spots). Rather than blaming my poor luck or trying to use luck as a safety net, though, I was able to win by doubling down on the choices I’d previously made that I thought were good, not using luck as a proof that my choices were bad and not worth following through on and not breaking from the plan. I had fewer tools to work with, but the plan was still intact.

In the previous turn, I’d set up a number of objectives for myself, playing very aggressively and securing a strong lead. I was still in the lead as my opponent ended his turn, just not quite as far ahead. Rather than trying to retaliate against my opponent, I simply continued the plan I’d started with, finishing off the objectives I’d set up. I had one model who could accomplish that goal, but he was able to do it before getting knocked out at the end of my turn. Looking back, I was lucky that my rolls worked out as well as I would’ve liked, but the reality was that my choices in my previous turn had given me what I needed to secure victory, even put very far behind in my opponent’s turn.

photo by joe philipson

Despite appearances, I’m actually extremely risk-averse. I take a lot of chances that seem risky, but I’ve often done a lot to mitigate or negate the penalties for failure. I’ll take long-shot chances if the risks are low, but I’ll rarely take even good chances if the stakes are very high. As a result, from the outside, it looks like I’m taking a lot of chances and somehow making most of them work, but the reality is that I’m only taking chances that don’t harm me overmuch if I fail.

From the outside, this looks like luck. On the inside, I believe in my ability to assess and mitigate risk, and the choices I make as a result.

Luck is believing you are lucky.

Source: Digital Initiative
Luck

Playing Competitively

May 26, 2015May 7, 2015 by Tamrielo

I’ve talked before about the joys of unsophisticated play. The low-to-mid tier of play has a lot of joys that are often left out in the mad scramble many make for the top, competitive tiers of play. Whether that’s missing out on the fun of playing suboptimally and organically discovering strategies or remembering to read the story as you work your way to max level, there are a lot of things you miss if you don’t stop and smell the roses.

On the other hand, the experience of playing a game both competently and competitively is an experience and a joy all its own, and is worth pursuing even if you don’t consider yourself a competitive player. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who look at games or parts of games that seem “too hard”, and I know they’re able to do them– I’ve seen them exercise the necessary skills. Our (first) raid in FFXIV was extremely skittish about going into Coil, because coil was “really hard” and we weren’t sure of ourselves. We crushed everything up to Turn 5, and once we passed Turn 5 we slammed through most of Second Coil all the way to Turn 9. This week, we took our break from Turn 9 attempts to fight some new primals, taking down Titan EX for some folks who hadn’t gotten it, and also dropping Odin and Leviathan EX.

We had avoided Good King Moggle Mog Extreme for months, because of its reputation for being super rough, and once we stepped foot inside we won within three attempts, and can more or less trivially farm that boss. The group is very skilled and very capable, we just need to remind ourselves of that on occasion.

I want to take a little break to talk a bit about fun. Stealing a page from Raph Koster’s book, fun is what happens when your brain is exercising. You see patterns and enjoy watching them recur, and causing them to recur in the game. When you’ve mastered the patterns, the game becomes boring. You become frustrated when the game presents you with what looks like noise. When that noise resolves itself into a pattern, or when you can start to see how the chaos becomes something sensible, that’s when your brain is having fun.

Everyone is at a different level when it comes to this sort of thing. Players playing at unsophisticated levels of play are having fun because they’re resolving the noise into patterns still. Highly skilled players playing at that level will be bored, because they’ve mastered those patterns and want to move to higher tiers.

You can keep a game fun for a lot longer than you might expect by raising the difficulty– either literally or by trying more and more difficult things, keeping yourself at that level where you haven’t mastered the patterns but you’re not just looking at noise. The worst that happens is you fail, no different from an accidental misclick or a lost ‘net connection, or just jumping off a platform to see if you can.

I mentioned above that there’s enjoyment to be had in watching patterns recur– this is why we see very similar movies and similar themes in TV shows, why a particular type of entertainment is popular for a while and you feel inundated with the type. If you’re looking at the available offerings and feel like they’re all the same and uninteresting, you’re either looking at a pattern and just seeing noise, or you’ve mastered the pattern and gotten bored with it. It’s why game publishers run franchises into the ground and why WoW gets a spike of people with each expansion and loses them more and more quickly each time.

For myself, I don’t play fighting games or most board games at a terribly sophisticated level. If I play either one at all, I play it once or twice and move on to something new, a different experience. In the case of fighting games, I understand the patterns conceptually but in practice they’re all just noise to me. I have a low threshold for memorization, and tend to avoid games where skill is about memorizing or keeping long strings of data in my head.

On the other hand, when the new Thief came out, I played it start to finish not just on the highest difficulty setting, but with about 80% of the additional “even harder” options active. I played through Dishonored on my first playthrough at the highest difficulty setting and went for the wholly-pacifist “Clean Hands” ending. I love those types of games, and I’m used to the patterns enough that I want the additional challenge or the game is boring for me.

In a similar vein, I have rarely played the same Infinity list twice, and have never brought the same list to two different tournaments. Constantly changing my lists keeps me seeing new patterns and keeps the game fresh for me.

The trick is to find a balance between trivial, assured victory and frustrating, predictable defeat. Don’t be afraid to lose or fail, because doing both of those things is how your brain realizes something is exciting and a potential test of its abilities.

Source: Digital Initiative
Playing Competitively