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Tumblr was the first site to host the blog for President Barack Obama in 2011.
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Using baffle.js to obfuscate text in Twine (Sugarcube v2)
Last year I decided to port my short story In Memoriam to Twine, with light interactive elements. In Memoriam is an epistolary piece, an archive of gathered snippets of academic papers, automated transcripts and personal diary entries, and during development I decided to emphasise the personal nature of the diaries by presenting them as 'encrypted' text, which the reader could then actively decrypt with the click of a link.
Within standard Twine 2, I couldn't get the sort of effect I was after, and my understanding of Javascript integration with Twine is nowhere near sufficient to program my own plugin, so I started looking for an existing Javascript library I could use.
Then I stumbled across @camwiegert's baffle.js, which was exactly what I was looking for. It was relatively straightforward to install and include in my Twine project, but there were enough minor obstacles to overcome that I thought a quick how-to would be helpful for anyone else trying to achieve the same effect.
- First, download the minified baffle.min.js file from https://camwiegert.github.io/baffle/
- baffle.min.js will need to be included in a subfolder called /js/ in the folder containing your Twine html file
- Note: There is probably a way of including this code somewhere in Twine, but my attempts to incorporate it met with failure. If you get this to work in your own project within Twine itself, I'd be interested to know how.
- In the Story Javascript of Twine 2, add the following code:
/*
<<baffle [speed], [delay], [duration]>>
Custom macro to control Baffle text scrambling
speed : [optional] frequency of text update in ms (default: 50)
delay : [optional] number of ms until text starts revealing
duration : [optional] number of ms text takes to fully reveal
*/
Macro.add('baffle', {
handler : function () {
try {
console.log("Running baffle with speed " + this.args[0] + ", delay " + this.args[1] + ", & duration " + this.args[2]);
b.start()
.set({ speed: this.args[0] })
.reveal(this.args[2], this.args[1]);
} catch (e) {
return this.error("bad conditional expression: " + e.message);
}
}
});
- Now the javascript is set up, open the passage you want to obfuscate.
- Wrap the text you want baffle to affect in a span called "baffle", like this:
<span class="baffle">Enter your text here</span>
- To start with the text obscured, add the following text prior to your "baffle" span:
<script>const b = baffle('.baffle'); b.once();</script>
This takes your text and runs it through the baffle macro once, giving you a jumble of characters.
- To create the Decrypt link, use linkappend as follows:
<<linkappend "Decrypt">><<baffle 10 1000 1000>><</linkappend>>
The three arguments to the baffle macro call are:
i) speed: time (ms) to pause between iterations
ii) delay: time (ms) to delay before revealing your text
iii) duration: time (ms) to run before revealing your text
- Finally - and most inconveniently - once you download your Twine story html, the following line of code needs to be copied into the <head> section of the index.html file:
<script src="js/baffle.min.js"></script>
I added it just prior to the closing </head> tag.
- Note: A side-effect of this requirement is that you will need to export your Twine html each time you want to test the baffle code, as it will generate errors without access to the external javascript code. Again, this is something which may not be required if there's a way to load the baffle.min.js directly into Twine, so if you resolve this issue I'd love to know how!
Miscellaneous Tips:
- It should be possible to change the characters used to obscure the text by adding a 'characters' argument to the .set function in the macro code above, but that's beyond the scope of this tutorial. (There's more information on the baffle.js website about the other functions I'm not using.)
- I changed the 'decryption' rate as the reader progresses through the story, both to avoid them getting bored with the effect and to subtly imply that the AI was getting better at decryption over time. At the beginning of the story, the baffle call is <<baffle 120 1000 2500>>, while by the end I'm using <<baffle 10 0 250>>.
- To support someone wanting to return to previous entries in the archive without having to decrypt again, I set flag variables for each decryption in the Story Init passage to false, then used if statements to conditionally baffle each passage only if it hadn't yet been decrypted, for example:
<<if $decrypt1 eq false>><script>var b = baffle('.baffle'); b.once();</script><</if>>\
Then I used <<replace>> to add <<set $decrypt1 to true>> into the passage once the Decrypt link was clicked.
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In Memoriam (2018)
In July of 2018, my mum passed away after a number of years suffering from Alzheimer’s. It was a shock, even if not entirely a surprise, and as the dust settled I realised I wasn’t going to be in a creative headspace for quite some time.
In lieu of creativity I returned to my existing story In Memoriam, a tale of motherhood and memory and thinking back fondly on all the kindnesses a loved one showed you. Originally published in the British Fantasy Award-shortlisted anthology Tales of Eve, I’d always been very proud of this story, but its epistolary nature didn’t lend itself well to being reprinted online.
Instead I decided to adapt it to Twine, with light interactive elements in the manner of a museum exhibit, in aid of Alzheimer’s awareness. It’s a free, twenty-minute story of AI, hope and the future of humanity.
Please have a read, and let me know if you enjoyed it!
In Memoriam, on itch.io
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2018 Games & Books Writing Roundup
The majority of my short-form writing in 2018 - collected below - was for Unwinnable’s Exploits, a monthly agglomeration of short blurbs and slightly longer essays on notable pop culture. Subscribe to Unwinnable Monthly and get Exploits for free each month.
Automation is one of life's true joys. Take something hard to do, offering little satisfaction but taking too much time and energy, and build a machine to generate the same result with a fraction of the investment. Conveniently ignore how much time it took to automate. Gleefully watch your precious machine churn out far more of the end product than you could ever want. Repeat.
Factorio encapsulates this urge, and before you know it your lone machine becomes a production line which becomes a factory stretching for miles, conveyors and robots and laboratories fed by automated research, all ticking away in satisfying union. Until something jams, and the entire thing grinds to a halt. Time to get your hands dirty again!
In the modern era it sometimes feels like tales of the Fair Folk have been stripped of their menace, and fae fiction is often stifled by the same old tropes.
Not so in Peadar Ó Guilín's The Call, where modern-day Ireland has been cut off from the rest of the world, and every child trains for the day the sadistic, facetious, vengeful Sidhe drag them into the faerie realm as prey for their unearthly hunt.
A tense, unforgettable supernatural thriller.
In 1953, a meteor impacts near Washington DC, annihilating much of the eastern seaboard and threatening the slow but inevitable extinction of life on Earth. Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars (and its follow-up, The Fated Sky) chronicles the subsequent acceleration of the space race through mathematician and pilot Elma York, who joins the nascent space program as a computer, performing the labyrinthine calculations required for orbital trajectories faster and more reliably than the limited technology of the time. Humanity must establish itself on other worlds, lest our planet become our grave.
In the shadow of apocalypse, Elma's ambition is utopic. She believes that humanity can overcome the technological, mathematical and logistical complexities of space travel, through close collaboration of experts in every field, a global collaborative effort. The Calculating Stars isn't afraid of venerating expertise, but nor is it blind to the petty bigotry which stifles such efforts, nor Elma's well-meaning naivete; when she realises she will never be satisfied merely watching other people go into space, her desire to become an astronaut leads her into conflict with the sexism (and sexists) standing in her way, and the racism and xenophobia her fellow pilots and computers face in every aspect of their lives.
Elma can't solve the problems of 1950s America, but where The Calculating Stars succeeds is in imagining a world in which men and women of all races and nationalities can reach for greatness despite systemic inequality and their personal differences, without resorting to easy answers or magical thinking. When faced with a dire enough threat, and with enough people willing to work together for the greater good, maybe humankind can put aside our differences long enough to save our species.
Gitaroo Man (2001) is a surreal, bombastic musical odyssey rammed full of demons, wormhole-dwelling shark robots and jazz-wielding bee royalty. Though developer iNiS went on to make the superlative Osu Tatakae Ouendan, Gitaroo Man stands tall at the pinnacle of the rhythm-action genre.
The fantastical narrative has a familiar bassline. Teenage loner protagonist U-1 discovers his dog Puma can summon a mystical instrument which turns him into the heroic Gitaroo Man. U-1 immediately rejects his prophesied role as saviour of the universe and flees, forced into a succession of musical duels with aliens seeking to claim the Gitaroo for themselves.
Battle is a high-speed to-and-fro, each combatant taking turns to let rip with a devastating riff while their opponent rhythmically defends from each successful note. Flying to Your Heart's electronica and Bee-Jam Blues's trumpet-driven jazz are brutally satisfying, and victory can be euphoric. Yet Gitaroo Man doesn't reach its peak until Born to be Bone.
Despite a touch of early-2000s cultural insensitivity - and some excruciating voice acting - this mariachi-inspired track succeeds through a conjunction of multiple escalations: narrative, technical and musical. The prior track is a love song with U-1 sitting peacefully under a tree, all gentle attack and no need to defend. Born to be Bone thrusts him back into combat against a trio of skeletons in the shadow of an intergalactic internment camp, the fate of both the prisoners and Puma at stake.
It's the first time U-1's fought for anyone but himself, and with Puma incapacitated, he begins the fight Gitaroo-less. The game's usual back-and-forth is disrupted; U-1 has no chance to attack, only defend desperately with no special powers or fancy armor to save him. If he survives the Sanbone Trio's overture, a ricochet frees Puma, and U-1 makes his transition from whiny child to decisive hero; in his shout of "Puma, Gitaroo!" is contained a new determination.
As U-1 takes up his mantle the track morphs from a deadly flurry of maracas into a split-second duel between the skeletons' percussive rhythms and Gitaroo Man's fast-fingered classical guitar. As liberated prisoners rally behind him, and a wave of trumpets lead his devastating finale, he seizes his destiny with callused fingertips.
U-1 is no longer alone. That moment of transition has changed him, and changed you too. Now you both have something to fight for.
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2017 Games Writing Roundup
In Nier: Automata‘s opening monologue, our android protagonist 2B expresses her desire to meet God and kill Him. It’s a deliberate thesis statement in a genre obsessed with solving all the world’s problems through deicide and, despite its early bombast, Nier is far more interested in the vacuum left by god’s absence. While its escalating proxy-war between androids and robots soars to ever more ludicrous heights of anime melodrama, the core plot is merely a matrix holding together a series of bittersweet, personal character arcs, vignettes and philosophical explorations of the search for meaning and purpose in a ruined and indifferent world.
A stark contrast to 2017’s trend of major publishers being terrified of their games having something to say, Yoko Taro and his team at Platinum have crafted a provocative, thematically consistent meditation on what it means to be human. Nier doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but instead offers guidance to find your own meaning in the spaces between bullet-hell chaos, robotic cults and beating a sentient oilrig to death with its own chainsaw arm.
Originally published by Unwinnable
*CLONK* haunts my dreams. *CLONK* is failure made percussive, the sound of beautiful theory colliding with the hard limits of cruel reality. When I haven’t properly thought things through, or when my brain has failed to correctly account for the rotations, pivots and extrusion of my carefully-placed mechanical arms and reagents grind together, bringing intricate clockwork to a fatal halt, *CLONK* is my punishment.
Opus Magnum‘s puzzles are simple in concept: take reagents from a limited number of stacks, and manipulate them by arm, by track and by transformative glyph until they bond together to form the desired alchemical molecule. As in Zachtronics previous games, the process is an abstraction of programming, but where SpaceChem and Shenzhen I/O intimidated, the physicality of Opus Magnum‘s molecules lends clarity. When your mechanism fails, it’s plain to see where the failure occurred; when you succeed in crafting a working machine, your reward is to watch your solution wind its way through multiple iterations, before being scored across multiple – often conflicting – criteria.
There is no one, true solution. You build a working machine as best you can, using as many pieces as it takes – even if the result is a bloated monstrosity of tracks and wheels and pistons – and then it’s up to you: either take your success and move on, knowing that it’s good enough and that you’ve evaded *CLONK* this time, or dive back in and rebuild your machine smaller, faster, with fewer pieces, symmetrical in form or action, and watch it cycle endlessly towards clockwork perfection.
Originally published by Haywire Magazine
Splinter Zone is happy to wear its inspirations on its sleeve. Its colorful robotic foes and slightly-awkward ladders, its unforgiving jumps over bottomless pits – harried by passing mecha-birds – invite comparisons to Mega Man, but it’s fast and fluid in a way the blue bomber never was. Equally it harkens back to the heyday of the Atari ST & Amiga, from the psychedelic demo-scene stylings of its menus to its Bitmap Brothers-esque soundtrack.
It’s a sparsely communicated experience, focused more on rapidly iterating through a randomly selected – and sometimes visually incongruous – series of run-and-gun stages than delivering a single polished obstacle course to be conquered. Stage gimmicks come and go, and you adapt on the fly or die, a single demise booting you back to the beginning of your run with nothing more than a score and a disdainful judgement of your performance.
Much like its inspirations, Splinter Zone demands much from the player. Mere competence isn’t enough; the limited margin for error demands memorization of its stages, while simultaneously denying the opportunity for easy pattern-recognition through its randomized nature. Bottomless pits and spikes kill with a single touch, while taking the slightest damage strips you of your hard-earned weapon upgrades, which otherwise can be traded for a brief burst of power but leave you significantly weakened in its aftermath.
At times, Splinter Zone feels obtuse and unfair. And yet when you’re in full flow, when you’re leaping between bullets, barely clinging on to your multiplier, slipping into secret paths and eliminating your enemies in sky-shattering pixelated explosions, Splinter Zone feels just right.
Originally published by Haywire Magazine
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Pyreflies in the Tower
Warning: Contains spoilers for The Dark Tower, Final Fantasy X & Final Fantasy X-2
At the end of The Dark Tower, with Roland Deschain on the threshold of the tower itself, Stephen King takes a moment to address the reader directly. He explains that this is the end of his seven-book epic, that he wishes to tell you no more of Mid-World and all that lies beyond. He calls out those readers who demand specifics of what happens after, "the grim, goal-oriented ones" who must know what Roland finds at the end of his journey. After all, the contents of the tower are rarely the point of dark tower stories; it's the journey to arrive at that threshold which resonates so strongly with us all. He warns that should you read on, "you will surely be disappointed, perhaps even heartbroken".
Yet - after complaining that some readers will feel cheated if he doesn't give them a more fleshed-out ending - King then plunges into a final, divisive scene which tries (and arguably fails) to describe the interior of the Tower and what lies at its peak.
When I first read The Dark Tower, this apparent act of literary cowardice infuriated me. I agreed with King; I had enjoyed the journey, and I didn't need to know what lay inside the Tower. But if there was more to be read, after seven indulgently-long books how could I simply stop, and assume that whatever came after brought no further context, no sense of completion or conclusion that I would otherwise have missed. While there's a valid argument for me taking responsibility for my own enjoyment, that's a temptation I - and many other readers - will never be able to resist.
As a storyteller, I'm more sympathetic. There may be a Right Ending to a story, one thematically consistent with all that went before; often there is an ending the reader wants to see, a True Ending where their favourite characters get what they deserve, and which ties up all their loose ends. Sometimes these two do not coincide.
---
This all came to mind recently while replaying the inconsistently numbered Final Fantasy X & X-2. Despite water-breathing anime sportsboy Tidus being ostensibly the lead character of FFX, the plot revolves around the pilgrimage of the young summoner Yuna and her efforts to rid the world of Sin, an enormous prayer-powered space whale from a long-forgotten war. While travelling together Tidus and Yuna fall in love, yet even the revelation that Tidus is a dream of the ethereal Fayth - and that defeating Sin will cause him to cease to exist - does not deter Yuna from her path.
In a genre full of unsatisfying denouements, FFX's ending is a shining light, perfectly balancing the salvation of the world with the emotional stakes for the main characters. Faced with a choice between the lives of all the inhabitant of Spira and the continuing existence of her lover, Yuna makes the Right choice, the heroic choice, the one which every element of the storyline prior to this point foreshadows. She banishes Sin, then in her rush to embrace Tidus passes straight through his now-ethereal form. It's a singularly heartbreaking moment, and perfectly encapsulates the weight of her loss in her moment of greatest triumph.
The power and poignancy of the ending reverberated in the collective conversation of FFX's fans. Considering how irritating a character Tidus is for most of the game - a spoiled, oblivious man-child obsessed with being the centre of narrative attention - he is clearly changed by the end of his journey, and the bittersweet end to his relationship with Yuna spawned reams of fanfiction. When the Japan-only Final Fantasy X International edition included a bonus cut-scene teasing Yuna's discovery of a recording of an imprisoned man looking uncannily like Tidus, it seemed to point to an obvious conclusion: the first true Final Fantasy sequel had heard fandom's outcry, and somehow Tidus's continued unexistence would cease.
---
Of course, no JRPG plotline is ever that straightforward.
By comparison to FFX's strictly linear pilgrimage, Final Fantasy X-2 hops back and forth between locations from the prior game as Yuna and her friends explore the colossal shifts in culture and the balance of power instigated by their overthrow of Spira's theocracy. Similarly, the sequel's tone is a more mercurial affair, its weighty sociopolitical plotline balanced with frequent deviations into joyous flights of fancy - from impromptu pop concerts to anime-inspired farce - and against the odds it works. The Tidus-a-like turns out not to be our aqueous attention-seeker after all, but rather a thousand-year old ghost - named Shuyin - genocidally obsessed with avenging his lover, a summoner bearing more than a passing resemblence to Yuna.
Faced with Spira's destruction at Shuyin's hands - ably assisted by yet another improbably-named ancient weapon of mass destruction - Yuna has no choice but to bring low this ghost who wears her lover's face, and to banish him once more from the world. In a story preoccupied with themes of coming to terms with the consequences of your actions, of learning how to live again in a world set adrift from the status quo, Yuna's victory is in making peace with her choices and finally letting Tidus go.
I would argue this is the Right Ending. It's the ending the entire thematic thrust of FFX-2 builds towards, and also the ending Kazushige Nojima, the scenario writer for both games, had originally intended when he told Famitsu: "We had several ending patterns prepared, but when it came to ‘what about a happy ending?’ at the time, I thought ‘no, there can’t be one’."
And yet it's not the True Ending, nor even the Good Ending. For those you must play this 80+ hour RPG again, in the exact order the developers intended the story to proceed, and meeting a number of very specific criteria along the way. Without adhering strictly to a guide, I would reckon the 100% completion True Ending to be nigh-on impossible.
For this display of dedication, an act of painstakingly stepping through FFX-2 again in almost ritualistic fashion, Tidus is mysteriously returned to life by the Fayth and tearfully reunites with Yuna. It's ostensibly a happy ending - Yuna gets what her heart desires, an outcome only made possible by her determination and persistence - yet simultaneously it unpicks the thesis which the bulk of FFX-2 seems to support: Yuna will always love Tidus, but she doesn't need him. The True and Good Endings may well be true and good, but are they the Right Ending for this particular story?
---
Yoko Taro, when talking about the writing process for Nier: Automata's euphoric Ending E, told Siliconera: "I started thinking about what would be the most fitting ending for all of those characters, and that resulted in the E ending. It’s not something that I desired, but I believe, in the world of writing, the characters move toward that ending themselves, and they directed me to write toward that end. In the end, it’s probably what the characters had hoped for – what they would have desired."
Similarly, even though Nojima may not have intended FFX-2 to have a happy ending, he told Famitsu: "after the game was released and I was able to see the fan reaction to it, I changed my mind."
I spent tens of hours reading Stephen King's epic series. I spent hundreds of hours playing FFX and FFX-2. When readers and players live in someone else's world for so long, growing to care deeply for their favourite characters, is it a bad thing to give them the ending they long for, even if the story seeks a more fitting conclusion?
Unlike books, games have the luxury of multiple endings, and I've always felt the urge to follow a story to its very limits. It's only recently that I've begun to question whether the True Ending and the Right Ending are necessarily coexistent.
Then again, perhaps there's an argument to be made for FFX-2's approach, gently gating fan-favourite endings through effort. I couldn't resist simply turning the page when the True Ending of The Dark Tower was offered to me, but when FFX-2 asked for another eighty hours to bring Tidus back from the watery depths, I hesitated. Did I care that much, or could I happily accept the ending I felt was Right, even if it wasn't the True Ending I knew existed out there for those dedicated enough to reach it?
After all, if I couldn't live without Tidus and Yuna's happy reunion, another eighty hours immersed in the minutiae of Spira might not seem like such a trial, but more of a painstaking ritual, a summoning of a beloved spirit back from beyond the Farplane.
And who am I to deny the faithful their rituals?
Inspired by Critical Distance’s Blogs of the Round Table on the topic of Denouement.
Big thanks also to J. B. Rockwell for digging out the text of the Dark Tower Coda for me when I realised I no longer owned the book, and was increasingly concerned my annoyance from years prior had corrupted my memories.
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The World Ends With Youth
This is a reprint from Unwinnable Weekly #66 (22 October 2015), available to buy here.
You wake to the same music you heard yesterday, the same music you'll hear tomorrow. The bustle of the busy street is too loud. Who are those people rushing to work, to school, back-and-forth like shadows? You don't know, don't care. They're not important. Head down, 'phones on, don't make eye contact. You'll get by just fine without them.
What's the point of other people, anyway?
---
The World Ends With You’s protagonist Neku initially seems cut from the same antisocial amnesiac cloth as Final Fantasy's Cloud and Squall. Yet where those archetypal teenagers often felt teenage by design only - young men emotionally stunted for the purposes of plot and marketing - Neku is utterly defined by his adolescence. The epitome of teenage isolation, he's tried to understand other people, but his total lack of adult empathy makes them intrinsically unknowable, an unsolvable enigma. Faced with this failure, he cuts himself off from the rest of humanity with his iconic headphones; everyone else is just noise, unnecessary complication.
When Neku wakes up lost in the crush of Shibuya's iconic Scramble Crossing - his memories taken as entry fee for the Reapers' Game, an otherworldly contest for the recently-deceased to fight for a second chance at life - he's forced to reassess these preconceptions. Under attack by physical manifestations of the hated Noise, it isn't until he teams up with another Player, budding fashion designer Shiki, that he's able to fight back. If he can't learn to cooperate with his new ally, to make friends and forge alliances with the other teenagers trapped in the Reapers' Game, he faces erasure. Only by surviving seven days of increasingly challenging trials can Neku win his promised resurrection, and to do that he's going to have to trust his partner, leave behind self-centred introversion and take his first steps towards emotional maturity.
While adolescent protagonists are an overused default in JRPGs, adolescence is rarely anything but lazy shorthand. The stereotypical teenager is driven by a desire to shrug off parental influence, leaves home to forge a place in society, and in the process needs the workings of the adult world explained to them by those they meet along the way. Plot elements can be easily concealed by a teenager's lack of self-awareness and reticence to share secrets or show weakness, and any meagre character arc feels dramatic when it begins with a blank slate. Rarely does a narrative attempt to explore the realities of passing through adolescence, the confusion and conflicting expectations of growing up and being expected to navigate the complex rules and systems of adult life with little explanation.
By comparison, Neku's journey is a teen odyssey. Shibuya is presented as an adolescent playground, its disorienting web of streets and alleyways lined with all manner of music and clothes stores, ramen restaurants and fast food joints, concert venues and a hipster cafe run by an enigmatic graffiti artist who may or may not be ultimately responsible for the existence of the Game. Bands gather to argue in the street, while hyper-popular fashionista bloggers descend upon their chosen delicatessen du jour, driving their fans into a fury of consumerism. Collectible pin-badges are released by noted local designers, change hands for extortionate prices, then are smashed into each other in a playground game somewhere between marbles and conkers. Friends shop together, break up, make up, break up, make up, promise never to argue again. The latest tunes blare from mobile phone speakers while faceless businessmen scurry past like shadows on their way to whatever soul-crushing tedium consumes their days. If it wasn't for the threat of casual annihilation by passing Reapers - and the demonic-red countdown timer seared into the back of his hand - perhaps Neku could've eventually found some semblance of maturity wandering these streets within the protective aegis of his headphones.
Plunged into the Reapers' Game, however, Neku is forced to rise to a challenge he doesn't understand, bound by arbitrary rules and restrictions, utterly reliant on other people with their own conflicting agendas. His natural inclination to withdraw is denied by the necessity of cooperation - it's made clear from the outset that a Player with no partner is defenseless against the Noise - and it's only through Shiki's quick thinking when she first encounters Neku that his aversion to teamwork doesn't immediately get them both erased. Depriving him of his childish escape from the real world is a vital step towards emotional adulthood, of learning to trust people's intentions rather than dismissing them as unknowable.
Easing his passage into this enlightened state is a distinctive skull graffito pinbadge that all Players receive upon entering the Game, granting them telepathic powers over the living world. As Neku hurries through the streets of Shibuya on his Reaper-assigned tasks, he can peer through the veil and listen in on the thoughts and aspirations of the bustling masses he's tried so hard to ignore. Sometimes the missions require him to interfere with the real world, incepting concepts to nudge someone onto a different path, but more often than not Neku is merely a voyeur, the pin giving him the opportunity to look past someone's public façade and see the person beneath. It's another pillar of revelation on which his maturity is built, a symbolic awakening of empathy for other human beings.
But the Player pin's powers are limited to the living. Other Players are immune to its effects, so Neku must somehow trust them without the crutch of knowing their innermost thoughts. If he can accept Shiki for who she is, accept help from Beat and Rhyme and the other Players not yet eliminated, perhaps they can all reach the end of the Game unscathed.
---
Just as in the real world, nothing in The World Ends With You is quite that simple. The black-winged Reapers controlling the Game are far from neutral arbiters; in the manner of Greek gods, they pick favourites, set impossible tasks and incite moral dilemmas, toying with their prey before snuffing them out with all the empathy of a magnifying glass-wielding toddler. Beyond the petty machinations of low-ranking Reapers, the Game itself reflects the power struggles at the top of Reaper hierarchy, and Neku soon discovers he's little more than a pawn in a much larger game with the fate of all humankind at stake.
Despite the illusion of structure and clearly defined conditions for victory, the adults in charge of the Game have absolute power over the ever-shifting rules. The Reaper grunts in red hoodies loitering on Shibuya's street corners block Neku's path on a whim, demanding petty appeasement akin to schoolyard hazing before they'll deign to let you pass, while their immediate superiors vie amongst themselves to erase Players to both boost their own lifespan and advance their careers. Invisible, impassable walls spring up to herd Players like running bulls through their designated missions, truly little more than busy-work: an arbitrary gauntlet to weed out the weak and uncooperative. Without understanding the true motives of the triumvirate of Reapers vying for power over the Game, Neku has no chance of winning his freedom; a truth only fully brought home when his triumph on the seventh day is annulled, propelling him into a second week of the Game - and then a third - without Shiki at his side.
The recurring seven-day structure is key; it implies not only that there are set rules to the Game, but that it's possible to become good enough to win within the boundaries of those rules. It's the same uncomfortable fallacy society promises all teenagers as they approach adulthood: join the System, play the Game by the Rules, and if you work hard and don't make a fuss you too can Win. The seven-day structure aligns our expectations to Neku's, and we share his confusion and betrayal each time his well-earned victory is snatched away on a technicality. He's once more plunged into the crucible to be tempered by other partners, the infuriating and secretive Joshua, and Beat, a Player-turned-Reaper.
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Despite widespread acclaim, The World Ends With You was criticised on release for being unnecessarily obtuse, its systems interlocking in often counter-intuitive fashion. The combat is strikingly unorthodox, your party fighting simultaneous fast paced real-time battles on the Nintendo DS's two screens, torn apart but forced to work in sync. Neku and his partner share a health bar, as do their opponents - who exist in both fights simultaneously - yet the two screens play nothing alike. Neku's is an isometric touch-oriented brawl of sweeping stylus strokes, frantic tapping and split-second evasion as the suite of pinbadges which power your abilities recharge. Meanwhile, your partner combos through strings of D-pad mapped attacks, each chain matching cards to fuel screen-wiping superpowers. It's initially baffling, and beyond a static tutorial screen little effort is made to help you understand the intricacies of the combat.
It helps that you're given responsibility for the degree of challenge you wish to face, neatly sidestepping concerns of whether you'll grok the game's systems. If you're unable to cope with the rub-your-stomach-pat-your-head synchronicity of the combat, you can delegate your partner's actions to a mildly inefficient AI, while a generous difficulty slider is freely available to be tweaked at whim. Characters and pinbadges level up in typical RPG fashion - even when you're not playing the game - making grinding an option if you get stuck, but this is neatly balanced by a strong risk-reward incentive: by choosing to temporarily sacrifice character levels you boost the drop rate of ultra-rare pinbadges only available on harder difficulties, which can be further enhanced by stacking multiple fights together into a single overwhelming encounter.
Viewed as part of this confusion, the combat is thematically apt. It's a wake-up call, a declaration to the player that things aren't going to be comfortable and familiar, and just like Neku, you're going to have to try to keep up. Just like the transition to adulthood, the key is gaining enough competence to survive, and after that you can choose to either strive for mastery or settle for doing the absolute minimum.
Critically, The World Ends With You's opening hour is very clearly intended to be baffling, to unsettle the player and characters in equal measure. Neku is torn from his oblivious teenage existence and wakes up already fighting for his life, while the arbitrary nature of the Game's objectives, the opaque motivations of the Reapers and Neku's own struggles to remember who he is and how he died all contribute to the sense of being carried along by unfathomable tides, desperate to stay afloat. Outside the cocoon of childhood it's impossible to know everything; adults often have to figure things out as they go, and for the first time Neku is forced to engage with the adult world - abstracted into Reapers and Games – and discovers it to be more complex than he could possibly imagine. Like the rest of us, he can only push forward and hope he learns enough about how things work before his ignorance of everything else destroys him.
For the player, the chaos of battle accentuates this desperate sense of displacement: two screens full of tribal-tattooed kangaroos and missile-launching porcupines, demonic rhinos and concrete-dwelling landsharks, two different sets of evasions and attacks competing for your fine motor control as you dash between foes and unleash devastation with a fury of taps and flicks. Alternating combos between your characters boosts your damage further, synchronising their disparate actions into a single stream of discordant aggression. In mastering this unconventional combat, you're bringing Neku and his partners to a new understanding: teamwork isn't easy, but if you trust in your friends, learn their rhythms and support their weaknesses, you'll achieve things you never would have been capable of on your own.
Empathy isn't just an unintended side-effect of the Reapers' Game, but a prerequisite for the emotional maturity Neku must attain before he - and his newfound friends - can bring the Game to its necessary conclusion. The Game acts as both a literal and symbolic purgatory through which he must pass to enter adulthood, but as the Game begins to unravel around him he discovers its true purpose: to judge whether humankind deserves its continued existence. If the kid who wanted nothing to do with other people is now unable to prove their inherent worth to the godlike figures passing judgement upon them, there may be no adulthood for him to return to.
He can't save the world alone, but when the credits roll, it's not Shibuya that's changed. It's Neku, a child no longer, his eyes finally open to the world he's abjured for so long.
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Treasure: The Moment
This is a reprint from Unwinnable Weekly #55 (29 July 2015), available to buy here.
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The lock clicks.
Music swells in heroic anticipation, the payoff for progress or exploration or epic achievement, for defeating some terrifying denizen of a palatial ruin or delving into the most secret depths of a trap-strewn dungeon. With the excitement of a child on Christmas morning, you lift the lid and peer inside, hoping for a glimpse of wealth beyond your wildest dreams.
The treasure chest is a videogaming staple, the simplest of mechanics to deliver a smorgasbord of itemry into your hands. Press A. Get Potion. Repeat. It's the wrapping paper around your present, a tantalising veil which offers a momentary sense of wonder at what could be hidden within, before you tear it open and discard the remnants in a flurry of overzealous enthusiasm. So entranced are you by the promise of wealth yet unattained that you pay scant attention to the wrapper, each treasure chest merely punctuation for your continuing adventures, an uptick in your fortunes clothed in the trappings of sacrament.
Despite its apparent simplicity, there's more to a satisfying treasure chest than just its contents: the sound of hinges, the weighty clunk of aged metal, the gleam of gold seeping out as you crack the lid are all integral facets of the experience. The act of opening a chest is ritual, an expectation of reward with conventions and traditions laid down in the game mechanics: Rainbow Islands' chests fountain fruit and cake unhygienically across the room - an iconic exuberance more recently employed by Henry Hatsworth and Shovel Knight, amongst others - instigating a panicked dash to snatch up your prizes before the arcade's incessant pacing drives you to the next stage. Diablo and its various imitators take a more functional approach, treasure chests popping like overripe pimples at the slightest provocation to spew coins and irreplaceable magical armaments across the floor with a distinct lack of ceremony, as if that precious moment of anticipation is nothing more than a pesky interruption in your rush to accumulate MOAR TREASUR.
The Legend of Zelda has swung the opposite direction over its various iterations. While A Link to the Past relied on a single frame of animation and a brief rising-scale musical motif before presenting you with your ill-gotten gains, more recent titles in the series increasingly linger on that anticipation at the expense of pace. Tension builds with a rolling, rising, accelerating scale as Link drags himself over the lip of the chest, surveys its gleaming contents and at last reaches deep inside to pull out yet another ancient mystical artifact essential to your quest, before triumphantly brandishing it towards the camera with heroic fanfare, seeking your perusal and approval in equal measure.
These rites frame your interactions with the reward systems of the game; after all, you've conquered the risk, so what else is left? The only question once you've performed the appropriate genuflections is whether you are rewarded with a triviality - a handful of loose change, a health potion, a common drop - or a treasure of genuine value. Secret of Mana's chests inexplicably flee from you, growing legs and sprinting across the room before they can be cornered and plundered, their contents varying wildly from the most miserly of consumables to an infinitesimal chance of the most powerful crafting materials in the game. While Skyrim rewards you with suitably imposing treasure chests hidden behind its most dangerous and epic encounters, they tend to be so stuffed with a mishmash of grave goods that the only reasonable recourse is to Take All then spend ten minutes sitting on the floor, rummaging through your bags, throwing out books and wheels of cheese until you've discarded enough junk to be able to walk again. It's an emergent ritual of your own making, a seeming accident of game design which turns the treasure chest's satisfying punctuation into an extended awkward silence.
Ultimately the treasure chest is a cliche, a quirk of functionality inspired by tales of pirate booty and Count of Monte Cristo-esque treasure hoards. It seems unlikely that there has ever been a profusion of treasure chests in any real-life location to the same density as found in most videogames, but attempts to break away from the cliche often feel disingenuous. Final Fantasy VIII replaces the vast majority of its chests with Draw Points, ephemeral spinny tokens which ding at your touch and grant you a miserly handful of magic spell uses - which you most likely already have an excess of - while many modern games with RPG elements have replaced treasure chests entirely with rummaging through cupboards and trashcans. The Bioshock series in particularly relies heavily on this conceit, despite the mechanics of scavenging ammo and chocolate bars from someone's bins being functionally identical to the cliche but for the added incongruity of roleplaying a half-starved squirrel thrown haphazardly into the mix.
No matter how satisfying your interaction, how skewed or incongruous, the basic interaction remains the same. Press A. Get Money. Get Power. Get All The Good Things You Deserve As Reward For Your Hard-Won Progress. You can rest easy knowing you just have to Press A, and your life will improve. Magic spear or magic helmet. One rupee or a hundred, a steady advancement towards wealth and power.
And then, down in the dark, tangled in the deathtraps and deceits of Sen's Fortress, you are betrayed. In place of mystical artifacts and piles of forgotten gold lie cruel teeth and grasping hands and death. Your ritual is shattered, your expectation of just reward ripped from you and consumed even as you respawn, older, wiser, more afraid. Warm anticipation is replaced by cold dread, forever lodged in your maw as you inch towards your promised reward, hoping that this time the promise is true. Oh god, let it be true...
While the concept of mimics - chest monsters lurking in the dark, waiting for some greedy adventurer to devour - has been around for decades, Dark Souls is notable for its terrifying execution. Sen's Fortress is a nightmarish maze of swinging axes, arrow traps and rolling boulders, which perfectly primes your expectation of reward when you overcome the worst of its excesses. After all, every treasure chest thus far in this notoriously difficult game has been a reward, a brief moment to luxuriate in success before forging on to new horrors. Which is why this particular mimic is seared so intensely into your psyche when you reach down to claim your prize, and it savages you, uncoiling grossly slender limbs just in case you survive your mauling long enough to back away in horror, your escape route obstructed by those same traps which lured you in with promises of fair recompense for your bravery.
Whether or not you survive that first encounter, its repercussions are felt all the rest of your days. That cold dread wasn't just adrenaline, shock, the instant of betrayal. It becomes your stock reaction, replacing the joy you felt at the sight of another treasure chest in the gloom. Instead of rising scales and heroic bravado, you tiptoe closer, your weapon held at arms length as if guarding you from the possibility of being betrayed again. Every chest is poked and prodded to ensure it's an inanimate wooden box and not a savage animal lusting for your flesh.
Press A. Pray You Aren't Torn Asunder.
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We Don’t Talk Any More: Conversation in Prince of Persia (2008)
This is a reprint from Unwinnable Weekly #5 (25 June 2014), available to buy here.
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Threaded through the rhythmic combat, wall-running and puzzle-solving of 2008's Prince of Persia is an ongoing dialogue between its protagonists, the wise-cracking vagabond known colloquially as 'the Prince' and the Princess Elika, heir to a decaying realm and a temple which for a thousand years has sealed away the dark god Ahriman. Yet the Tree of Life which sustained Ahriman's bonds is broken, shattered by Elika's grieving father.
Together the Prince and Elika delve into the ruins of her city in an attempt to heal the land, seeking to repair Ahriman's prison before he can escape. As they face the obstacles in their path they bicker, they joke, they tell stories of their vastly-different lives. The Prince hides behind a mask of bravado, of seducing pretty girls in the marketplace, of wandering wherever the wind takes him and seeking his fortune in forgotten tombs in the heart of the desert, while Elika's life - despite her memories of how glorious the rubble they now scamper through once was - has been one of duty. Even as her people lost faith and drifted away, she's held on to one central tenet of belief: for the sake of the world, Ahriman must never go free.
While optional, these conversations are a core gameplay mechanic. Just as there is a button on the controller assigned to Attack, and another to Jump, there's another specifically reserved to Talk. It's through dialogue that the Prince encounters Elika's determination to do the right thing at any cost, to be the hero of her story despite his exhortations to just walk away. Surely someone else can save the world without Elika risking her life? Through dialogue Elika mourns her shattered kingdom, weaving stories - as one would at a wake - of a childhood spent amongst its verdant gardens, gleaming towers and proud people. Through dialogue, the Prince's carefree facade begins to slip as he struggles to support Elika, their quest becoming ever more perilous, and learns of her untimely death and resurrection.
Her father betrayed everything she held dear to return her to life, in exchange for Ahriman's freedom, and Elika makes no secret of the apocalypse her father's grief threatens to unleash. Ahriman "will take everything else that remains. He will swallow cities, devour the land. There is nothing that can stop him." Unless she can heal the damage her father has done there will be no hope of survival, no deus ex machina to rescue them from certain doom. There is no putting this djinn back in the bottle: once he escapes, Ahriman will consume the world.
One by one Elika and the Prince conquer Ahriman's lieutenants, face down corruption and death, and through the healing of the land they draw close. Despite their differences they grow to understand each other, respecting each other's talents and viewpoints even when they disagree. Beneath his arrogance the Prince is no cardboard cut-out: his perspective noticeably shifts over the course of their journey as he grows more conscious of his role in Elika's destiny, and despite the opportunity to walk away and resume his life, he chooses to stay, to help Elika finish her quest and save the world. Yet in their moment of triumph he realises the truth, that the Tree of Life was shattered to bring Elika back from the dead. To seal Ahriman away once more, Elika must give up her life, as she's known all along.
Too slow to prevent her sacrifice, the Prince can do nothing more than gather her lifeless body into his arms and lay her atop her mother's tomb. The conversation is over. Yet Ahriman whispers temptation in the Prince's ears, to undo all that has been done. To make the same pact Elika's father did. One life, in exchange for the world.
He has a choice to make.
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There is another conversation, one which Elika and the Prince remain unaware of even as their words lead them into love. All the tales spun through the ruins of Elika's home, all the memories shared, the philosophies and mythologies and subtle moralities laid bare are parts of a wider dialogue, between Prince of Persia and you, the player. You're the one pushing Talk, the one who wants to hear more, and the narrative repays your curiosity by enrapturing you in a tale of ethical ambiguity, of dark gods and a noble family estranged by death and duty.
And once it has you under its spell, the narrative makes you complicit to their debate. The characters' conversations are founded on big questions: what is the value of a single human life? What does it mean to love someone enough to respect their desire to do what's right, even if the path they walk will surely end in death? The narrative lays out its arguments through dialogue, asks you to hear both sides of the story and allow your preconceptions to be challenged. It offers no answers, no absolute authority, demanding that you think for yourself. Is free will intrinsically superior to adherence to duty? What about when the world is at stake?
At the last, when the Prince lays Elika's body upon cold stone, these are the questions which must inform his choice.
No, not his. Your choice.
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Except there is no choice.
The fading echoes of Ahriman's power whisper in the Prince's ears, and the Prince decides that the only possible outcome is to repeat the actions of Elika's father. There is no conversation, no debate. Elika is dead, and the narrative is no longer listening. There is no option to respect Elika's wishes and return to the desert, leaving her destiny fulfilled and Ahriman once more imprisoned for a thousand years.
Despite everything that came before, the narrative decrees that the Prince values Elika's life above the continued existence of the world, and you - as the Prince's puppetmaster - are forced into carrying out its will, or else switch off the power, leaving the Prince eternally standing guard over Elika's tomb. With each sacred tree you shatter, you undo hours of progress, until at last your sword lashes out at the Tree of Life itself.
Even with Elika returned to life, the conversation is dead. The Prince has betrayed her just as utterly as her father did, and she cannot bear to look at him. He carries her into the desert as the credits roll, and Ahriman rises from his thousand-year confinement to destroy the world. And hers is not the only betrayal. The narrative entranced you with discussion and argument and open-minded consideration of conflicting viewpoints, but at the crucial moment it denies you the choice it promised, and instead railroads you into the worst possible outcome.
There are no happy endings here. Ahriman is free to devour the world. Elika lives, yet has nothing to live for, her mother dead, her father corrupted into a sick caricature of mourning, and her destiny denied by the Prince's deliberate sabotage. She can never forgive him - there is no forgiveness for such a profound betrayal, especially when committed in the name of love - and the affection which blossomed between them can do nothing but shrivel into a broken-hearted memory. It's a twisted mockery of the 'love conquers all' trope, one where 'love' involves rejecting every principle your beloved held dear, dooming both your nascent relationship and the world.
You could perhaps argue that the Prince we were introduced to at the beginning of the story - the cocky rogue stumbling through a sandstorm in search of a donkey laden with gold - might have considered that choice, yet through his interactions with Elika, he becomes someone else. He may disagree with her dedication to duty, but he learns to respect it. More crucially, he's no idiot, and the repercussions of his actions have been discussed in considerable detail. When a dark god offers you your dreams in exchange for the world, unthinking obedience is the wrong call.
Player choice is certainly not a prerequisite for a satisfying story, but here its absence is palpable, as if removed at some late stage in development. Not only do the protagonists discuss choice and destiny in considerable depth, but the Prince's decision is distinctly unsatisfying for all parties except Ahriman himself. In a 2009 interview with 1up.com Prince of Persia's producer, Ben Mattes, said: "I think story driven games that have multiple endings are a mistake, because then you don't know what the real story is." Yet the 'real story' that remains feels unfinished, the narrative heavily foreshadowing a moral choice which never comes and a denouement in which Elika's sacrifice is permitted to save the world.
We can only surmise whether it was a decision made in anticipation of a sequel which never came, the result of top-down intervention from Ubisoft management, or a creative compromise to make the most of a finite development budget. It may well be pertinent that the Epilogue DLC released shortly afterward is a direct continuation of the story, requiring Elika to be alive for you to overcome its increasingly elaborate skate-parks. Yet in living up to its name, the DLC does little to advance the story. Our protagonists' easy conversation never rallies, reduced to the Prince's increasingly-shrill demands that Elika must be some form of mystical saviour who can still fix everything, and Elika reprimanding him in turn for undoing everything they achieved together.
Whatever the reason, the conversation is over. While controversial in many ways, Prince of Persia succeeded where so many narratives fail, in crafting an evocative world, portraying a convincing relationship, and daring to ask meaningful questions.
Until you dare to answer. Then Prince of Persia doesn't want to know.
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Games of the Year 2016
For the past few years I've been involved in writing blurbs for Unwinnable (2013) and Haywire Magazine's (2014, 2015) Games of the Year coverage, helping to shine a spotlight on some of the great videogames of the past year that went overlooked. While I didn’t have the opportunity to be involved this year, what better way to open this site but with a handful of esoteric games which made me smile even in the darkest reaches of 2016.
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Overcooked (PS4, XBO, PC)
Do you have friends? Do you enjoy attempting to collaborate with said friends in a series of increasingly chaotic culinary scenarios? Buy Overcooked! It's great!
Overcooked came out of nowhere to become the best local multiplayer experience of the past year. Its initial simplicity is deceptive: take an ingredient, chop it up, slap it in a pan, serve it on a plate, collect your tip and repeat. Until there are four of you, rushing around a crowded kitchen and bumping into one another as orders stack up for different dishes and you're trying to coordinate with your friends because the kitchen's on an iceberg and the pantry's behind a fusillade of cannonballs and the pizza oven flew south for winter and now you're shouting and JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WON'T SOMEBODY WASH A PLATE BEFORE THE SOUP CATCHES FIRE, and DING!
Your three minutes are up, and you're sweaty, exhilarated and ready for another round.
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Furi (PS4, PC)
I haven't played such a crunchy, tactile hunk of pattern recognition since Gitaroo Man. Beneath the triteness of its faux-philosophical flavour text, Furi is a precious rarity, a bullet-hell boss-rush brawler, your silent samurai carving his way through a single jailer at a time in the most ill-thought out space prison escape in history.
It's unashamedly demanding, frustrating and repetitive, as you're beaten into a pulp over and over. Then, slowly, your initial clumsiness gives way to clashing blades and quick-drawn pistols and fast-reaction dodges, your opponents shifting forms and attack patterns as you master them and return their pummelling with gusto.
Only once you've learned the steps do you realise it's been a dance all along, every glowing, glimmering, weighty contact of blade on blade performed to a strict rhythm, dash, counter, charge, stun. Scythe them in two, and descend to face your next foe, a new dance with unknown rhythms.
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Subnautica (PC, XBO - Early Access)
It's been sixteen years since I last strapped a compressed air tank to my back and plunged into clear blue waters, but I still recall the sense of wonder at the unknown, the disorientation of staring out into the endless deep blue of open water, and the trepidation of wondering what might be watching me from the depths, sizing up a tasty Rob-shaped morsel.
Even in its Early Access state, Subnautica effortlessly captures all of the above, its alien ocean just familiar enough to instil that old dread, but deep and full of mysteries. Abandoned colonies, malevolent leviathans, and a vast swathe of technology to be salvaged from the flotsam of your crashed starship, whose radioactive hull looms over you, a constant reminder of your predicament.
Subnautica was so good that I stopped playing it, unwilling to spoil any more of its surprises before the devs have time to tie it all together into a polished gem. But there's already plenty there to explore, and once it's finished I doubt there'll be a finer oceanic exploration to be had on this or any other world.
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