Tamrielo

Aggrochat’s Game of the Month was There Came An Echo, and it’s worth listening to the podcast about it if you’re interested in it at all.

The title of this post probably gives away what I think of the game, but it’s something I want to delve into a bit more deeply. I am a great big fan of games that are, essentially, proof-of-concept demonstrations. They’re some of the best things to come out of the indie space, proving out various concepts that might otherwise never see the light of day. There Came An Echo is one of those games with a fascinating technical premise– your voice as the primary input– put into an actual, functional game.

I love these sorts of things because they’re lightweight and spark the imagination. I left There Came An Echo thinking excitedly about all of the possibilities. As I mentioned in the podcast, I think the game itself is a solid B, but the potential and the kinds of things it hints at are worth an A.

It puts me in mind of the multiplayer features of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, specifically the spies vs mercs gameplay mode. Voicechat was built into the game, but it was audible not just to your teammates, but to anyone close enough to you location in-game to hear you. It put a twist on the usual types of voice communication, because if you wanted to be really stealthy, you had to go silent and keep both your enemies and your teammates in the dark.

It’s a little detail, a point of friction, but it makes things feel immersive. A number of people I know hate the word “immersion” as relates to video games; it’s a word that’s thrown around a lot, usually part of the “this breaks my immersion” phrase, and it’s often extremely ill-defined. I think of immersion as a sort of friction– a difficulty that the game presents that makes the experience feel more authentic. It manifests in various ways, but when properly done, it provides the sense that the game will act in the ways you expect, particularly when the game is simulating something, which most games are. If you have trouble controlling the game, or if the interface is needlessly obtuse, you’ll be pulled out of the experience; similarly, if things are too easy and you feel like you’re breezing through things that should be difficult or that the game tells you are difficult with ease, that will also pull you out of the experience.

The concept of communicating what needs to be done to a team is a really interesting one, and in a lot of cases there’s an existing friction inherent in getting that message out– either through the complexities of voicechat and ensuring your background noise isn’t affecting things or typing in a text box on the fly. As that technology becomes more and more ubiquitous, such as when it’s integrated into every Xbox Live and PSN game such that your existing communications hardware (that comes with the console!) is a part of every game, you can start to come up with interesting implementations.

The sort of friction you get from more immersive experiences allows you to make encounters less complex and more varied. If I had a game where my team had to navigate a dark space with flashlights and could only hear each other while within range, that would create a scenario in which even a simple enemy encounter would be very intense and very exciting, when it might be boring or run-of-the-mill in a well-lit space with omnipresent communications.

I’m really interested in the idea of nonstandard features making experiences more interesting. A lot of games, particularly MMOs, have to continually ratchet up the complexity and lower the margin of error in order to provide challenging experiences, because they have relatively few axes on which to create challenges. If they could introduce more interesting, more varied encounters through environmental effects or other limitations, there’s a lot of potential for interesting gameplay without creating what feels like an impossible complexity wall, both easing the burden on scripting as well as allowing players to come up with more varied solutions than the single path many high-end encounters demand you follow.

There Came An Echo is a really interesting demonstration of a different way to look at controlling a game. I think the next step is a game where you’re giving voice commands to AI-controlled teammates while playing a direct role in the game yourself (as opposed to the eye-in-the-sky role), but that’s the sort of thing that needs a lot of support and potentially a triple-A budget to pull off appropriately. It’s why proof-of-concept tech demos like There Came An Echo are so important and so interesting, because they’re the things that pave the way for the bigger, slower-moving games who are necessarily more risk averse, but are always looking for a strong new concept.

Source: Digital Initiative
There Came An Echo (On Glorified Tech Demos)

It’s a pretty great day today, if you’re into human rights and equality. If you’re not, I think it’s a very good opportunity to evaluate for yourself why that is. There may be any number of reasons, but it’s worth understanding them for yourself and being consistent in your behavior. Rather than hiding behind a wall of rhetoric, it’s worth considering why today’s events make you happy, angry, or whatever else.

I used to find it frustrating when people didn’t like media that I loved. It’s easy to associate your emotions regarding a particular thing with your sense of self, and then view any criticism of that thing as a criticism of yourself. I love Thief– I think it’s a brilliant game that changes the dynamic of so many video games and focuses on movement and exploration instead of violence– outright punishing use of force in a way that other games don’t. It’s important, though, that I don’t take the extra step and say that because Thief is a nonviolent game, that it’s somehow better in some absolute (moral/philosophical/whatever) way than other games that aren’t nonviolent. It’s easy to take that step into pushing that view onto others– trying to portray something as objectively good rather that subjectively good imposes that viewpoint on the people hearing you, which I think is problematic.

We seek to validate our opinions, and one of the things that’s come from the Information Age is a shift from validating our opinions through the acceptance of those around us to achieving validation from “facts”. We’ve become masters of rhetoric and debate in the last decade, with an endless wealth of information and education at our fingertips. We can justify any opinion with some piece of information that cements our validity. Sometimes this is worthwhile– certain particularly complicated things are worth researching and developing opinions on based on fact. However, note the timing there– the opinion is based on fact, not supported by them. When we then take these opinions and push them on others, we’re forcing our knee-jerk reactions on people and trying to mask that in some way.

A lot of times, we get some kind of input and have an immediate reaction to it, deep in our hindbrain, before it reaches our consciousness and becomes subject to rational thought. When we’ve already had our reaction, it’s easy to use our (powerful, effective) rational thought processes to justify, rather than evaluate. Frankly, we’re wired to do so– doing differently is difficult for us. The complexity and nuance of our world has grown faster than our brains’ ability to process it as effectively as it could. I think that we can often gain insights into ourselves and a better appreciation for our own opinions when we try to break that cycle and honestly evaluate why we hold the opinions we hold, rather than justifying them. Our opinions may or may not change, but we’ll understand them better and (I think) be more secure in them.

I like Thief. Externally, I like that it represents a nonviolent approach to games through a lens that’s normally violent, and I applaud the creativity there, but that’s not why I like it. I like Thief because I have spent much of my life not believing myself physically competent enough to handle a conflict, should one arise. My mind has always been my refuge, and any advantages I gain and any problems I solve are done with my mind rather than my body. Thief lets me express that– it’s a game about being smarter and more observant than your foes, who are all stronger and hardier than you are. It’s a space in which it’s okay to be smaller than those around you (I am) and rewards planning and observation (which I’m good at) rather than necessarily requiring quick-thinking and twitchy reflexes (which I lack). It’s a game that makes me feel okay about being the kind of person I am, rather than creating a person wholly unlike me that I can use as an escape for a while before inevitably returning to the real world, in which I lack the qualities of the protagonist I just finished experiencing.

I dislike The Witcher. It’s a game that makes me uncomfortable with its setting and characters, and while I recognize its quality, I don’t have much of a desire to spend time in that world doing the things that exist in that space. There are a lot of things I could say about the Witcher– how it treats women, how it exacerbates certain societal issues, but the reality is that those are justifications– I don’t like the game because, regardless of its quality, it makes me uncomfortable to play.

I don’t need to justify my opinions on Thief or The Witcher with some kind of moral or statistical high ground– I’m not trying to tell people they should or shouldn’t like either game. I often recommend against people playing Thief, because it’s a game that doesn’t appeal to a lot of people, and in a similar vein, I’ve suggested The Witcher to people despite personally disliking it.

Sitting down and evaluating why I like or dislike something often makes me realize things about myself, helps me better decide what new things I want to try, or simply makes me feel secure in my opinions. On occasion, I will run across something that is genuinely important, something bigger than my opinions, and that needs evaluation with data and facts… or that barely affects me in any way, and requires that I just step back and let the people who have a genuine stake in the issue weigh in.

I love Thief, but it would be unreasonable for me to demand that everyone love it. I dislike the Witcher, but my opinions on it shouldn’t impact the enjoyment of people who love that game for entirely legitimate reasons. I am largely unaffected by gay marriage at a personal level, and my opinions on it are best summed up as “it’s a good thing, because it makes people happy and more free in a way that doesn’t significantly affect others”. I’m in favor of increased happiness and freedom, and I’m in favor of people playing the games they like.

Today is a good day for issues that are bigger than just opinion, and it’s a good day to play a game you love.

Source: Digital Initiative
Live and Let Live

One of these days, Kodra is going to tell me to shut the hell up about comparative media and culture. He’s probably not going to be wrong about it. Lately I’ve been fascinated at the kinds of things we don’t realize we’ve internalized. Sometimes we can see things, or the shape of them, but it takes a lot of effort and a lot of really focused thought on things that we take for granted.

I’ve answered this question differently many, many times in the past, but right now I think that if I could have a superpower, it would be perfect fluency in every language. I’d love to delve into stories as told by other cultures, and see where they differ from what I’m used to. I’d love to see how the unceasing spread of globalization has caused some cultural concepts to bleed through to other places and which are the ‘core’ of a given society and resist that sort of change. I’d love to really understand what makes right and wrong in a culture entirely unlike mine.

I think it would probably make me insane. Trying to find space to process that many differing viewpoints on some very core philosophies would be next to impossible. We compartmentalize and create our own fences around whatever we consider our defining philosophies. I have a feeling this kind of behavior isn’t universally representative to the human condition, but I’m too close to the issue to be able to tell.

For something a little less abstract, in a conversation recently Kodra pointed out to me that he’s never seen an anime wherein the characters interact with the legal system– you don’t see people going to court and there’s no interaction: people are sent to the system and (it is assumed) are handled appropriately. To me, it’s a stark contrast to the American view of things, where there’s an inherent distrust in the system and a need to see justice served, sometimes (often) bypassing the legal system entirely and creating justifications after the fact. That inherent distrust of the system runs really deep– I can’t think of very many people I know who look at the system and say “yeah, it works”, and the few people I know who do are often ridiculed for being overly naive. I can’t help but wonder what the feeling is like elsewhere– what cultures implicitly trust their systems and which don’t?

I used to guiltily feel like I didn’t care much about other cultures, because I never found myself interested in cultural festivals or shows or music. I’ve been finding that that’s not true, that I’m fascinated by other places and people, but that I want to know about the philosophy and how it influences day-to-day lives. I occasionally like to say that I’m interested in finding out about other cultures by seeing what they do for fun, because how people have fun is such a good window into how they view and interact with the world. It’s a big part of why I like games– as a cultural medium, they have so much to say and I really enjoy seeing the kinds of systems people create to interact with for fun.

I’ve been making an effort lately to try to be more aware of the things that influence my opinions and reactions to things, and try to figure out both why I like the things I like and why I dislike the things I don’t like. There’s a whole subset of TV shows that I’m going to flippantly call “professionals being unprofessional” that rub me the wrong way– a lot of dramas and comedies revolving around a particular career tend to frustrate me because it bothers me to see the unprofessional, under-disciplined characters come out on top. It’s possible it’s gotten better, but a lot of early shows in that vein fit the bill of “brilliant X who knows better ignores the rules and turns out to have been right all along”. I have a hard time enjoying that sort of thing.

On the other hand, I recognize the need for conflict and difficulty in a professional drama– I’ve had Law and Order recommended to me a number of times as a seminal work that doesn’t portray trained professionals being unprofessional, and I suppose I’ll have to give it a go at some point.

haruhi disapproves of my babbling.

My thought process right now is all over the place; I’m making connections and analyzing the kinds of things I like. I just caught myself thinking about why I like cooking shows that pit chefs against one another in a fair competition but deeply dislike the ones that add on uneven variables– I adore the original Iron Chef but don’t really like what I’ve seen of Chopped. I feel like there’s a thread there, some link between why I have those opinions about cooking shows and why “professionals being unprofessional” shows bother me, but right now it’s eluding me.

Source: Digital Initiative
Deeply Hidden Threads