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paragonrobits · 3 years ago

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A friend asked me to give a stab at a Tierlist Maker for Video Games Not Yet In the Video Game Hall of Fame Tier List Maker, so here's my list for it!

This is based primarily on what I considered to be overall value to gaming history as a whole, with games with greater influence or impact ranking higher than those that had less impact on those to follow, or on culture. All the entries are those that have been nominated to the Hall of Fame, but not actually inducted as of this post's writing. Games that I personally like are generally rated higher, though mostly because I'm more familiar with them and thus can judge their impact from a personal POV.

(Tier List explainations, below!)

SHOULD BE IN ALREADY

Final Fantasy: I mean seriously. How is this one not already in yet?? It is not, as my research suggests, the first true RPG; that likely goes to games like Ultima. It is certainly an incredibly influential one; FF is a name closely associated with JRPGs in general, and its diverse class system is one of the strongest things to do with it, as noted by challenges like beating the game with a party of Black Belts. FF is THE name of RPGs in general and I'm startled it hasn't made it in, though I suppose that's owing to more notable entries (Hard as that is to imagine). It doesn't hurt that the majority of my favorite FF titles are those most similar to this one, such as FF6 and FF9, in terms of approaching the general world setting and class systems. Most significantly is that this game popularized RPGs and made them accessible, in ways that previous games such as Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest did not; the field of gaming would be VERY different without it; RPGs became VERY popular, to the extent of RPG elements being almost universal among other games in the modern day. (I am also pleased and amused to see 8-Bit Theater mentioned on the actual Wikipedia page. Now THAT'S notability!)

Sid Meir's Civilization: HEY NOW HALL OF FAME JUDGES, DON'T YOU BE MOCKING CIV, ALRIGHT. CIV IS FUCKING AWESOME. Okay, jokes aside, I'm genuinely astonished as the Civ series is considered the first true main game of the 4x series, and it shows; the entire genre centers around expansion, resource usage and diplomacying or conquering your enemies, and considering the impact of this game and its sheer popularity, to the extent of the meme of the game getting people to play for Just One More Turn, I'm a bit disappointed that it's not already in the hall of fame. I also note that I am personally more familiar with the spin off Alpha Centauri, a sci fi variant, which is still one of my all time favorite games.

Half-Life: Given this game's popularity, to the point of its release alone consigning the likes of Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines to cult classic status and its engine spawning a whole THING with GMod and the usage of physics mechanics in FPS games, one thing of note is its use of scripted sequences; at the time, an unknown in most games of the time. There may be something to be said for how the entire game is spent as Gordon Freeman, behind his eyes, possibly engendering a lack of separation between self and character that would be later emphasized in games like Bioshock. It's influence on games cannot be denied, with publications using it as a bookend between eras of gaming. One consistent element of what seems to make this game so distinctive is its approach to storytelling, without simply imitating film techniques which don't always work well with gameplay.

Candy Crush: This is an example of something I don't personally play myself, or even like very much, but I'd be remiss to dismiss it out of hand. There's no denial that phone games are one of, if not THE biggest market of games in the here in now; if now in scale, certainly in quantity. You might call it the TF2 Hat Economy theory; people aren't spending BIG bucks, but they are spending a LOT of little bucks all the time. It proves that highly accessible games that are generally free to play, with optional purchases, are a legitimate means of game business, and this certainly revolutionized how games were seen by the money-makers.

Super Smash Bros Melee: I loved this game as a kid, but truth be told i have a bit of a love-hate relationship; i REALLY dislike the competitive community that has fixated hard on this game, so any thoughts on it will have a slight element of pause beforehand. Even so, I can't forget the thrilled delight I felt watching the trailer for this game in supermarkets for the first time as a kid. at a time when getting any new games at all was a HUGE deal in my family. So, there is a lot of feeling behind this one! Ultimately, I have to concede that while i have complicated feelings about this game, its worth noting that the vast majority of things that made Smash iconic, and influenced the competitive scene AND the games inspired by Smash AND shaped the course of the series going forwards, largely owe themselves to Melee in particular. 64 was far more slow paced, while Melee began the trend towards much more fast paced action (and while I doubt it's SPECIFIC to melee as a whole, it may have been a trend for the genre from then). Melee is STILL widely played, especially on the competitive scene, and this sort of longevity always bears evidence of notability.

Goldeneye 007: I have to admit that despite being a kid in the 90s, despite someone who put most of their time into gaming, and despite being someone whose favorite system at the time was the Nintendo 64, I mostly missed out on the trend of history by honestly not being that much into this game. I have to say that I DID play it, however; I just never managed to get past the first level or so. I have strong memories of triyng and failing to sneak around a snowy lair of some description; it wouldn't be until the mid-2000s, playing Deus Ex Human Revolution, that I got the hang of stealth. All the same, personal indifference really doesn't matter much because HOLY SHIT THIS GAME HAS SOME STAYING POWER. IT HAS INFLUENCE, FRIENDORITOS. Perhaps chiefly, at the time it was made, consoles were not considered viable platforms for first person shooters; Goldeneye revised that notion, and created a whole revolution in multiplayer and shooter games. We would later see the ultimate consequence of this in games like Halo, which further revolutionized the whole genre. Ironically, the stealth attributes I was so bad at were part of what made the game so unique! It's one of those games that may not have aged well, by modern standards, but its import to gaming as a whole goes a long, long way.

Guitar Hero: I expect this one might be a bit hard to justify, but on its own, this game is INCREDIBLY innovative, though its not entirely the first of its kind, having mechanics based on earlier games. The very first entry has a respectable library of 30 songs, which is impressive considered at the time it was made, its not likely people expected it to get as far as it did; bear in mind that the massive libraries of later games were the result of years of this game series being a massive steamroller of a franchise! At the time, this one was an unknown. It has an interesting history as being a successor of sorts to an arcade exclusive, and inspiring a genre of imitators and spiritual successors on its own; of great note is the sheer impact this game had. With so many of those successors, the increased value of liscened soundtracks, and the way the game's concept became so influential, its astounding this one isn't already on the hall of fame. (It's also very fun, but fun alone doesn't make for memorability, sad to say.)

DESERVES IT AT SOME POINT

Myst - an iconic and incredibly atmospheric puzzle game, I'm genuinely surprised that I haven't heard talk about this one in some respect; it bears note as a rare game with absolutely no conflict whatsoever. I actually rank this one on par with the 7th Guest in terms of atmospheric games, though their tones could not be more different. So why do I think this game deserves it at some point? It was an incredibly immersive and beautiful game, lacking in genuine danger or threat, encouraging the player to explore and tackle the puzzles of the game. This sort of open-ended lack of peril makes it an interesting precursor towards certain flavors of sandbox games around now. It's worth noting that it was a tremendous achievement, given technical limitations of things such as the CD-Rom it was stored on, maintaining a consistent experience, as well as tying narrative reasons into those very constraints. It has been compared to an art film; if so, it certainly is the sort that invited imitators and proved to be a great technical achievement.

Portal: PORTAL! What can I honestly say that hasn't already been said by other people? The amazing integration of a physics engine into innovative puzzle solving, combined with a slow burn sort of minimalist plot reveal concerning the AI proving itself to be a kind of reverse HAL 9000? This game got a HUGE number of memes back in the day, and I expect anyone reading this can probably reference a few. The cake thing, certainly, and its relevance to matters of deception. There is much discussion over the game's utility in academic circles, which is certainly quite notable, and for my part, I'm interested by the point that at first the game gives you a lot of hints towards what you're supposed to do, gradually making it less obvious for the player you're on your own entirely, using your experience with the game to get past the puzzles from there, and its excellent game design. Ultimately though, I place this below Half Life in hall of fame urgency, because while I probably like this one more, it doesn't have the same impact on other games, per say. (That's a lot of awards for it, though. Wowza.)

Resident Evil: Is it fair to call this one the major survival horror game of its era? No, because it's apparently the FIRST, or at least the first to be called such. It's certainly up there with shaping the genre as a whole, both its immediate predecessors and modern games. The flavor of a survival horror can even be judged about whether its close to Resident Evil's style of defending yourself with limited resources vs controlled helplessness. It's also worth pointing out that I quite like the restricted, cramped setting of the mansion, rather than an expansive city; Biohazard was a real return to form, even if its something I mostly watched through funny lets plays because OH NO ITS TOO SCARY I CANT WATCH.

Asteroids: It's called the first major hit of the golden age of the arcade. I'm forced to say... yeah, it absolutely deserves it. The actual implementation and hardware of the game makes for interesting reading, and so its innovative nature ought to be noted: it lacked a soundchip at all, making use of handmade circuits wired to the board. It's reception was great, beating out Space Invaders and needing larger boxes just to hold all the money people spent on it. It also invented the notion of tracking initials on the top ten score, which has implications for arcade challenges.

Ms. Pac Man: This one consistently ranks HIGH in gaming records of its time, though there is admittedly some confusion to whether it or Donkey Kong was a better seller. Interestingly it appears to shape most of the gameplay mechanics people remember most for Pac-Man, such as the improved AI of the ghosts. It's more highly regarded than the original game, and on a personal note, I remember being a kid and seeing this arcade machine at ALL the laundry places my family usually wound up going to.

Frogger: It's placing on this list is not solely because CUTE FROG. The accessibility and wide appeal of the game bears a great deal of consideration, the flexibility of its formula, and just how many dang times it's been ported in one form or another. (And also, cute frog.) It also gets points for the creator being inspired for the game when he saw a frog trying to cross a road, hampered by the vehicles in the way, and he got out of his car and carried the frog across the street. The game is also evident of broad appeal, and some money-makers resisting it, goes back a long way; it was apparently dismissed as a kid's game by some, which just goes to show that some problems are older than quite a lot of gamers alive today.

Uncharted 2: this is one of those games where I cannot honestly say I have personal experience to draw from. Of the playstation's big games, I remember the Jak and Daxter series; I remember Kingdom Hearts, and I remember Ratchet and Clank, and I remember Infamous, but the Uncharted series remains

something of a 'I don't go here?' obscurity in my personal playbook. It does look memorable and charming from what I've seen, and one consistent element I've seen in comments about it is the cinematic nature of the game; it feels very much like a fun heist movie, based on what I have seen of it, and the notable thing is how the game FEELS cinematic.. in a literal way. As in, it combined elements of cinematography with game design, and that's no mean feat: what works for movies are unlikely to translate well to the interactive side, and it shows how that can be done for other games. The extensive praise does the game a LOT of credit!

WORTH NOMINATION AT LEAST

Angry Birds: As noted before, I'm not the biggest fan of most phone games, given that i prefer a more passive experience than most provide. As such, Angry Birds isn't something I've played as of this writing, but I have to appreciate the straightforward and simple gameplay; it reminds me a bit of the Burrito Bison game series, which I HAVE played, and I'm going to go out on a limb and assume it's because Angry Birds is probably the innovation that coined that particular style of gameplay. It's an example of what made phone games profitable and worth the time of developers to work at them; its easy for casual players to get into, and there's a fun sort of impact involved. Given the popularity of phone games, this one has a LOT of influence in getting that rolling, similar to candy crush, if not as much.

FIFA International Soccer: Simulation games are a tricky business; it can be really difficult to get them right, and this game provides an example of it being done in a way that a lot of people REALLY loved, set up an entire game series, and revived the 3DO system after a very bad year. Of note, apparently it was commented that it was more of a simulator than a console game, and this is rather funny considering how simulator is its own genre nowadays! Such do things change. It seems to have been a revolutionary game and simulation; setting the shape for modern sport games of its type, and tending more towards realism (accounting for acceptable breaks in reality) than was typical of the time. This one's position is thus picked for its impact as a whole; while it may not necessarily be a household name now, the series continues on, and is popular enough that even after 20 years, it's still been going.

Elite: I nominate this game in this position for being a startlingly early entry into what we would now consider open-ended games, even with an element of exploration and trading; if one stretches definitions a bit, a precursor towards gameplay of the like scene in 4X players who strive to avoid conflict, if possible. Its technical breakthroughs are some very interesting reading and make for good game history; a vast and complex game (not just by the standards of the era, either), and opening the door for persistent world games such as World of Warcraft.

Wii Sports: A significant game, and much as how other titles mentioned above were famed for gateway entries into gaming for an unfamiliar audience, or those that would want o play on a more casual basis. It seems notable to me for being most suited as a family game, or a more casual experience of multiplayer than usually associated with games like this; this has greatly influenced Nintendo's design philosophy, and one can see elements of this all the way through the Wii U onwards. It's essentially a fliparound from Mario Party; less competitiveness, but definitely meant as a group thing. Controversy is evident, because like with Mario Party, injuries did result from it.

Call of Duty: I place this one here because, while it DOES hold a very significant role in gaming history, with countless imitators, spiritual successors, being a game-changer in ways that its modern reputation might surprise you with, ultimately it is less so than other games such as Goldeneye, Halo or Half-Life. It's development in AI pathfinding and tactics is incredibly noteworthy from a mechanical perpsective, and the sheer level of awards it won is notable. In the end this game's popularity and continuing influence means that it shouldn't be overlooked.

Metroid: You can't spell 'Metroidvania' without this game! A relatively open ended exploration-based game with further options opening as new tools were found give it an interesting vibe, and the oppressive atmosphere distinctive to the game says great things about its sound and level designs. It wasn't the first open world game, or explorer, or even the first to open new aereas based on equipment, but it had ALL of these elements in a very memorable package. (Samus Aran as a female protagonist is something I'm a bit reluctant to give it credit for, as her identity was obfuscated for most of the game, and only revealed in a fanservicey way in a secret ending. All the same, credit where it is due, I suppose!) It's music seems to endure as a mood setter, too!

Pole Position: Perhaps not the FIRST racing game, but still considered one of the most important from the golden age of gaming, and the one to codify many of the firm rules of the game series. It's three dimensional gameplay is incredibly innovative for its time, and having played it and games like it in the past, I'm struck by how smooth the whole thing feels. No wonder it was popular! It is notable for having been designed specifically as a 3d Experience, meant to execute techniques like real drivers might attempt, which makes it a different sort of beast in that it tried to do more realistic actions; in some ways, a precursor to modern trends of realism in many games, for ill or best. Ultimately I think this one is worth a nomination because of its influence towards racing games (a popular and long lived genre, to say the least) as a whole.

OUTSIDE CHANCE

Nurburgring 1: On the one hand, I feel a bit guilty putting this one so low; it is recognized as likely being the earliest racing game in history, and given that I just finished noting Pole Position's influence, it feels a bit mean to rate this one as relatively insignificant all the same. However, in terms of notability, I never even heard of this one, and it was tricky finding information about it. Accordingly, that may say something about its influence, though this position DOES make it noteworthy as the first of its kind, albeit with Pole Position refining and introducing elements that shaped the genre.

Dance Dance Revolution: It feels a bit strange, putting this one fairly low. This thing was a MONSTER back in the day; entire arcades were built around the dancing control peripherals it required, rhythm based games or mechanics specifically invoked it by name, and it was an absolute cultural touchstone for years and years. So, why place it low? Partly, its because I can't just shove EVERYTHING into the 'deserves a nomination' folder; I do think it's fairly reasonable for this one to at some point get a nomination in the future, though ultimately there's games more noteworthy on the whole. It's specific rhythm qualities continue outside of its genre, and are quite influential to gaming as a whole, though unfortunately the series seems to have lost something in notability over time; popularity is a factor, but so is the impact on other games.

NBA 2K and NBA Jam: I put these two together because they touch on similar touchstones for me, and they really did popularize basketball games back in the day. Jam in particular seems to be invoking the Big Head mode that were a big thing in games at the time, at least going from the screenshot. They were very popular and highly beloved games back in the day, though I don't know if they have much influence on later games. I note that interestingly, they take opposite approaches; 2k focuses on AI and realistic experiences, while Jam was deliberately less realistic and more actiony in its over the top gameplay.

Nokia Snake: This one really impresses me for the sheer number of releases, in various forms, it's had! Interestingly, there seems to be little consensus on the name of this game; most just call it Snake or something on that theme. I went with Nokia Snake because... mostly, it sounds funny, and that's how its done on the list. This one is fairly low, but I Have to give it credit for having hundreds of releases!

Farmville: My mom liked Facebook games, a lot. And I am certain this one was one of her main ones! I rate it fairly low, and no doubt her spirit is yelling imprecations at me across the void of time, space, and abandoned socks; all the same, this one is ranked low because of the sheer number of displeasure aimed this one's way. (And to be fair, she complained about it. A LOT.) It is thus notable for unusually negative reasons; an example of exploitation, pressuring players to pester their friends to play it in an equivalent to electronic chain mail, and microtranscations.

Tron: I'm inclined to give any game that takes place in a computer land and uses programming or mechanical terminology a free pass! Interestingly, this has some association with the Snake game, as they have similar gameplay and Snake games are sometimes called Light Cylce games, after this one. It has an interesting history; the graphical system was chosen largely because it was believed it was more likely to be achieved before the deadline.

NO BUSINESS IN THE HALL OF FAME

Mattel Football: I do feel a little mean putting anything in this category; firstly because I don't want to make actual fans of something sad, and secondly because I believe you can probably find notability anywhere you look, if you are inclined. And here is the chief difficulty with this one: I could not find any real information in this one. It has no Wikipedia page, a google search only led to undescriptive links of SALES for the game, but not any information on the game itself. Notability is my main resource for sorting these entries, and honestly? If google has nothing on you, that's a pretty poor sign. Sorry, Mattel Football, but you look like a poor man's Game And Watch. You're no Portal, Myst or Pole Position.

#tier lists #tiermaker lists

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adamatomic · 5 years ago

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Design of Doom Eternal

Wanted to jot down some thoughts while they were still fresh, and I hate writing threads on Twitter, so, here we are.

(Surprise! Male game designer has DOOM OPINIONS. BEHOLD LOL)

First, disclaimers: what follows is super subjective, pretty picky, and likely unjustified. I love a good mobility shooter - Doom 2016 and Titanfall 2 are the only western shooters I really enjoy, and each do super interesting things spatially, mechanically, etc. However, I’ve never worked on any kind of FPS type of game, and never worked on a AAA game, nor shipped a game during a global pandemic, and there’s a lot that I don’t understand about what goes into making this kind of thing, much less how it’s even possible. Making a followup to a well-loved and hugely successful game is also a terrifying prospect. Finally, I am about to "dwell” on what I perceive to be “negative” things about the game, which is pretty unfair, because there’s a LOT of positives (it’s fun, it’s gorgeous, the load times are crazy short, the vistas slay again, amazing accessibility options, perfect audio, etc etc). But I think this is a game where a lot of the positives are really in your face, and what again I personally perceive to be the negatives are a little bit harder to put your finger on. And this isn’t a review, and definitely isn’t yucking anyone’s yums. This is me trying to figure out why this one feels a bit different to play. Hopefully the unanimously positive reception of the game by literally everyone everywhere (including myself) balances out whatever acid might be in these queries.

OK!

Jungle Gyms Versus Canyons

Ok, so. Doom Eternal is structured a lot like 2016 in that it’s corridors linking big wave-based arenas, which is a good structure for a game about shooting all the things. Arenas can be flat-ish or tall-ish. Tall-ish arenas seem to roughly come in two flavors: jungle gyms, and canyons. Jungle gym arenas are the ones that I feel like took centerstage in the marketing and gameplay of Doom 2016, as a way of showing off the double-jump / ledge grab / launchpad vertical mobility stuff, and because they make narrative / thematic sense in the human-built oil rig environments that comprise much of Doom 2016′s level architecture. Jungle gyms are distinguished somewhat from canyons by generally having what feel like distinct “floors”, or solid planes creating multiple separated levels of combat. Canyons, even if they have some transverse traversal elements, are more open and chaotic, with less concrete divisions between elevations. I’m belaboring this essential difference because it has a bunch of second-order effects on gameplay - jungle gyms allow you to jump from skirmish to skirmish, you can use your mobility options to “interrupt” combat, while canyons are more continuous. Jungle gyms usually have more obstacles (like the aforementioned distinct floors) which make it slightly harder for long range enemy attacks to land, which reduces the overall ambient damage-soak.

The key thing about all these arenas - flat open spaces, distinct jungle gym environments, and canyon style playgrounds - is that you definitely want all of them in your game, because the strategy and tactics for playing these fights changes a lot based on these constraints. When do you want a roof over your head? When do you not? When do you want your back to a wall? These are valid and important differences for these games specifically, especially when basic resource management strategies in these encounters is pretty similar, and because the enemy behaviors and attacks have so much variety.

So far, though, Doom Eternal feels like it has a WHOLE LOT of canyons, and NOT a whole lot of jungle gyms. It’s possible that this changes later in the game, so take all this with a big grain of salt. But the first 3-4 hours of gameplay are really dominated by canyon-style vertical arenas, which isn’t necessarily ideal in terms of variety (and makes you angst a little harder for the wall-run affordances of other mobility shooters). They also tend to be slightly same-y, outdoor, rocky environments, versus the more oil rig-inspired, recognizably human-scale mining structures of 2016 (I’m sure this changes later in the game too). The oil rig-inspired stuff also lends itself to jungle gyms a lot more naturally, so I feel like these choices of arena shapes and environment types are kind of an interconnected and difficult problem.

None of this would really even qualify as a problem, either - this is nitpicking nitpicks, at this point - except relying on canyons so much exacerbates some of the “fussiness” of the combat changes (those are next). For me, anyways - I’m not sure anyone else is feeling like these are problems haha. And it’s a big game, so I’m not sure how much this stuff changes across the whole campaign yet!

Tactical Ballistics

A Doom thing I adored in 2016 and am continuing to enjoy in Eternal is the way ammo, health, and other arcade-style upgrades are thoughtfully placed around the arenas. It’s a nod to the strongest parts of Vanquish’s level design, and goes all the way back to using coins in Super Mario to lure players out to new places they might not explore otherwise. It’s a huge part of what gives the nu-Doom arenas their “chess-like” feel, and shifts the fights away from Serious Sam-style battles and makes them into four-dimensional puzzles. 2016 doubles down on this tactical approach by leveraging a kind of resource triangle of chainsaw kills, glory kills, and just plain firefights.

A lot of Eternal’s design seems committed to upping the ante on all of these strengths. Lower ammo capacities puts more pressure on the chainsaw kills. There’s a new technique called “flame belch” that turns the resource triangle into a resource square to accommodate armor. Monsters have “weak points” now, shortcuts that change their behavior or get you fast glory kills. It’s a pretty compelling jigsaw puzzle of abilities.

It also places a lot of strain on player attention and cognition, because all this is running on top of straight-up arena-wave firefights (with 7+ enemy types at a time, all with unique behaviors and optimal strats) AND beefy mobility controls (swinging, dashing, double-jumps, ledge grabs, launch pads, etc). It’s kind of a lot. But I don’t think this is necessarily the place for saying “this is DOOM, man, you got to keep it simple, just shoot the monsters, how come there’s even upgrades” or whatever. For so many reasons, but the primary of which is that most of this stuff rules, and throwing it away would suck. So what do you do?

I want to focus on two small, specific things that really stand out to me - I’m not totally sure that they’re actually “bad”, but I think they have a lot of weird secondary and tertiary effects that contribute to some perceptions of “fussiness” in some of the battles.

Weak Points

This is a big enough change that it is repeatedly tutorialized through video on every loading screen, after every game over, and after every new enemy is introduced... so I know it was on the designers’ radar haha. And it's an interesting addition - chess fights in Doom are already about hierarchies, and adding another tiny hierarchy within an existing hierarchy is a NICE bit of tension to add, it gives a kind of scrambly feeling that is good overall. The issue for me arises from an apparent or perceived damage scaling issue around these weak points. For example, the optional sniper rifle upgrade to the heavy cannon and the optional sticky bombs upgrade to the shotgun insta-wreck the arachnotron and revenant enemies’ weak points, while sustained plasma rifle fire doesn’t seem to ever do the job. Which makes sense on paper - this is a nice way of putting pressure on the player’s weapon choices and ammo, which is what it’s all about. Although I guess you could argue that it’s also all about movement, and that this particular combat pressure has a pretty tenuous relationship with mobility in general.

Either way, it means you spend a lot of time squinting at your weapon wheel mid-battle to see how many shots your shotgun still has, because you ran out of chainsaw fuel a while ago, and are still being actively bombarded at a pretty long distance (because its a canyon and not a jungle gym). I know, I need to git gud, trust me, i KNOW. But check out the weapon wheel ammo display size in Doom 2016 versus Doom Eternal:

I love the new color scheme and ammo icons in Eternal! But it’s 3-4x harder to read the actual, very important ammo counts.

All these small changes add up to something that feels like a pretty different gameplay experience compared to the more spatial (read: movement-based) and literally easier-to-read resource management stuff from 2016. Which, it’s a sequel - failing to sufficiently differentiate it is its own huge risk. And, to be fair, 2016 had its fair share of fussy (though more legible) weapon switching. But when you add this stuff up, the matrix of considerations in moment-to-moment combat in Eternal is pretty different from 2016, and I think it largely comes down to the damage scaling around the weak points. While you can technically choose to play through battles without leveraging weakpoints (thus sidestepping most of these cascading issues), this approach is heavily incentivized by the major behavior changes that happen after you hit weak points (in addition to the constant tutorializing) and the waves appear to have been balanced around taking advantage of these things. Whether or not these are even flaws, technically, whatever they are is exacerbated by the UI design of the weapon wheel AND the relatively popularity of the relatively unobscured canyon arenas. So it’s hard for me to judge weak point damage scaling in a vacuum.

Overall, these new combat options make the arenas feel more constrained and more prescribed. Design is a nightmare this way: sometimes by giving people more choices, you’re actually giving them less. My pitch for a small tweak that might engage with some of these issues would be to keep weak points, but get rid of the damage scaling and maybe make the hitboxes a little bigger. The goal here is NOT to make weak point enemies easier so much as to open up options about what weapons you can use against them, thereby reducing wheel squinting, thereby freeing up more attention to movement and all the other stuff that ruuuules about nu-Doom in general.

Also, I should clarify that it’s entirely possible that I completely imagined the weak point damage scaling, and am a big dummy with bad aim.

Flame Belch

This is a pretty small thing, there’s this new “flame belch” move, intended to complement the existing chainsaw and glory kill moves as a way of “farming” resources from combat, one of the things that really defined Doom 2016. It differs in one huge way though, in that it has to be committed to BEFORE killing a monster. Chainsaws and glory kills ARE kills. Flame belch adds a status instead, which is “cashed in” later when you do the kill. If chainsaw kills and glory kills and BFG shots are Super Mario jumps, Flame Belch is more like a Tony Hawk jump - it starts early and is carefully calculated. Which is pretty dope!! But in this environment where weak point damage scaling and canyon layouts are already putting huge strains on the player’s attention, it feels like a big ask. The “triangle button” mechanic from 2016, the BFG, was a kill move with cool-down, so really I’m just suggesting stuff they already tried anyways. There’s no way this is news to anybody, much less the developers haha.

But... I would love to play a build where flame belch was totally a thing, just it was a finishing move, not a status thing. Let it plug into that reload-replacing resource-farming punctuation pacing flow. That shit rules.

Of course, I have to wonder what the unintended secondary and tertiary consequences of these suggestions would be. Good action games are often tenuous and deeply interconnected things where results are really hard to predict. Maybe they already tried these ideas and they sucked, or they know their own game a lot better than I do, and have a big stack of reasons this stuff would suck for most of their player base.

But wait...

Where The Hell Am I?

Last section, I promise.

I am extremely not going to weigh in on whether or not Doom games need “Story” or not, or what that even means.

But...

If you are driving a monster truck, it is probably pretty fun to see a big line of cars in front of you, and know that you are about to drive all over those cars, and that at the end is a really big fancy car... and you are going to drive over that too.

The general conceit of Doom 2016, that you are on one end of a Mars base, and you need to get to the other end, and in between is a whole lot of cars demons, is a good one. It has good monster truck-ness.

So far this is something that I’m struggling to extract from Eternal. I’m not really sure who any of these grumpy folks are, or where it is that they are, or why I am going down this corridor (aside from the very Doom-like fact that it is the only corridor around).

The problem for me is decidedly NOT that I don’t understand the slayer’s emotional whatever, or that I haven’t been painstakingly expositioned into the specific hierarchies of the demon universe, or anything that I think would normally be described as a “narrative”. For me, it’s that I don’t get to sort of soak in the anticipation of the loooong line of cars I’m about to crunch.

Does Doom need a story? Idk. Doom might need a lot of about-to-get-crushed cars though.

Finally finally finally, and this is highly subjective, but I think the slayer is just more fun when he’s an X factor or a rogue agent. NPCs recognizing the slayer feels sort of weird to me? The feeling that he is a fly in the ointment I think is stronger and sexier when he’s like... outside the canon, almost. I’m not totally convinced that having him Kratos around is as fun as having a bunch of demons and priests both confused and terrified of what this dude is doing.

I need to get back to family stuff. They let me sit here and type this out, which was very kind of them. Only five tantrums so far. Either way, I’m looking very forward to playing more Doom Eternal...

...just as soon as I finish designing 17 more shirts in ACNH.

Hope everyone’s staying home and staying safe! Rip and tear, friends. Rip and tear <3

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guaizine · 4 years ago

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About #Menswear Selected By Guaizine:

Digital Fashion Week - A One Time Only Event?

Milan S/S 21 Menswear @showstudio Round-Up Discussion

Just a few @guaizine reflections about some of the opinions from the experts panel:

..."we are not going to get into a pandemic again"... well, I would not be so sure about it, and I think that is the main reason why we should get digital fashion weeks seriously and realize about the potential they have as a format if we manage to take advantage of it in the proper technical way. Those designers still presenting traditional runway shows have different audiences, broader ones, in comparison with smaller brands where the designer as a person is not as important as the product itself. For these smaller brands digital fashion weeks become crucial, as they represent the only -effective- way to reach a client; direct one or an eventual retailer.

..."give the youth more control of the creation"... this is a very good point of view, and I am pretty sure that many of the people involved in fashion for years, -for generations actually - like happens in many of the houses that take part on the MFW for example, had or still does have that great idea of bringing new blood to their business in mind too, but I am pretty sure also that such a thing won't ever happen if that “old” generation do not effectively see that the new one has the proper tools to make it work.

..."Brands are forced to bring their narratives to people and audiences"... Yes! that is right and that suppose to be the right way to approach the digital fashion week from a brand point of view, that is why I was surprised about not hearing about brands like MSGM or Zegna XXX, that having a quite sharp knowledge of their audiences manage to arrive directly to the core of it with a couple of beautiful presentations undoubtedly effective, taking a few steps away for the storytelling and focusing way more on the product itself, a product that seems to be made for their very specific buyers, and not focused at all on trying to generate trends during the next season. Playing safe is always a valid way of being part of the game.

Another interesting point of view is the budgets brands have to put digital shows online, and is obvious that a bigger budget gives you the potential to do something better in theory but this is not always the case and this is the perfect opportunity to bring the Magliano presentation to the discussion, a low budget presentation with an original collection presented is a creative way, nothing was left behind, and everything works as a perfectly executed puzzle. The video is simply a video art piece, that gives to a group or fashion insiders with an unique point of view the task of sending a message to an audience they know well so they manage to address them exactly what they are expecting from the brand, going even further away by pushing forward the brand appealing with content that to me is interesting to look at also to people who is not actually interested in fashion.

..."I really didn't watch a lot of the films and stuff...because they are so much content to sort of digest"... and? so? What do you think editors do then during fashion week? How can someone build some criteria to later go and write a piece to be posted or published if it is not by watching in this case, or attending in person to every single show in each city season after season? How can you give an opinion about a fashion week by only looking to a few instagram feeds of two or three brands? would that be the proper way to approach a panel discussion?

About Philipp Plein, Pierre was quite clever about going further instead of giving it time to be discussed. I have the feeling that the main reason why we still listen about him and his "work" during every fashion week is because with plenty of resources you manage to survive even if people only talk about you to criticize what you do. Maybe a bit less attention will give him the chance to reflect on his strategy and realize that maybe he has a market -obviously he does have one- but fashion weeks are not the kind of platform his brand needs and that huge budget can be invested on design or marketing.

About Etro doing a physical fashion show instead of a digital one in a city that has been suffering so much during the last months, I think is a topic very difficult to talk about especially if you are out of the social, economical and even political context of it. So I will leave to the brand itself and their PR team to deal with it, but also will avoid giving my free opinion about it on social media because saying that the event was inappropriate because I saw people not wearing masks for example is not only superficial but shows a huge lack of understanding of the context of the industry of fashion in the country, of the circumstances of the city today and so many other topics that goes beyond fashion. So saving the social media hubs our opinions about it I guess is the right attitude towards an issue we all know so little so far. Let's focus on fashion guys, please.

..."The people who were invited to Etro...most of them were white"... how can we be surprised about this in 2020?, there is not much black people involved in fashion, it is been like that for decades, so for me the element of surprise has no place at all in this discussion, what should be the brand doing instead? Inviting a bunch of random people just to make the show look diverse? I think the problem we need to face here once again is the lack of diversity in people involved in the whole industry and not in a particular fashion show that happens to take place immediately after the world has been facing weeks of protests that fight racism. Ironically seem to me like is way more honest a show like that, than the attitude that the most of the brands adopted for digital fashion week trying, desperately to look "inclusive": Being "inclusive" in fashion in 2020 according to digital fashion weeks, from Russia to Paris is "to exclude", Yes, exclude automatically from any fashion presentation or show any blonde model, as simple as that, Go for it and you instantly become "inclusive". Sounds exactly like a few years ago when we saw in the industry suddenly loads of oriental models to reach runways, presentations, and magazines after the fashion insiders finally realized that the oriental market was exploding and greeting western fashion and lifestyle as never before.

About the @gucci presentation and "...who would wear that"... is funny that after years of Alessandro Michele, a panel with plenty of stylists think that way about the brand and seems not to have done the exercise of to look at the clothes produced by the brand and designed by the designer and his team, properly, closely and separately. They all seem to stop instead at the styled looks they get from a magazine, or sadly once again, from the brand's instagram feed...

Let's move on..."There are a lot of brands struggling to survive, struggling to sell"... I agree, that is not a secret to anyone these days, But ironically you only had time to "watch and digest" two, maybe three digital fashion shows and they were of the biggest brands, so? What is the point here? won't those small brands be struggling less if we all will be talking more about them? showcasing them more on our websites and YouTube videos? "watching and digesting" more of their design and ideas? Don't you all guys think that would be a more fair approach to it, and without a single doubt an easy and effective way to "help" them?

..."Milan is always a step behind Paris"... please, let's be careful about this kind of opinion because we risk to look like people that see and live fashion -once again- from and around Instagram and Tik tok. The only reason why Paris and Milan are different is because the brands they showcase are different between them, different because they have different audiences, different markets, different targets, those factors make the difference and are not the trends they generate or not after the runway shows the relevant matter on this issue.

About Versace, the approach I agree was quite good, very much attached to the times. But I still have the feeling, even a few days after, that they missed a huge opportunity to make something great! They have everything that they need to make a video successful, but the director seems to be behind on the timing of the scenes, and rhythm was the big absent on the film, the whole final product seems lacking energy and action, which seems to be difficult not to be able to reach with such a vivrant tune, an stunning dancer, and good clothes - either you like the brand or not- at the end the whole looked more like a music video and not as a fashion presentation. With probably a huge budget you would expect a pretty much perfect piece of content, especially if in the past, smaller brands like Grace Wales Bonner, did stunning pieces like Practice, directed by Harley Weir and Grace herself and Devonté Hynes as a collaborator, demonstrating that is not money to make the different in this cases but talent mixed and balanced in the right way is.

The collection was presented under the title of "flash" because it was a "see now, buy SOON" collection and not a "See now, buy now" since as you mentioned it was not very successful at the end a few years ago. Keeping on Versace, I agree Gianni Versace was one of the main designers of the 90's but saying today that the brand needs to be given "expertise, fabric development and technical design" sounds to me a bit irresponsable. If you want "something a little bit new" I suggest you once again to look and focus on NEW brands, If we like -or not- brands like Versace is because they manage to keep a concept during their history and they try their best to present it in a different way season after season; sometimes they reach better results than others, ( becoming a "miss more than a hit" ;-P ) but at least there is a constant attempt on going beyond fashion and transforming those ideas more into a lifestyle for the people that likes, follows, and more importantly buy the brand products.

Moving into the JW Anderson presentation I heard ..."A designer explaining the meaning behind it...we do not get that from the designer mouth anymore"... come on, that is what designers do to press right before every single fashion show is about to start, and they do it once again to press and buyers after the show ends, is part of the fashion protocole, it is been happening for years, decades, so you will get that from "designers in the future" still, there is nothing to worry about.

A final word goes to Pierre A. who I talked to very quickly on Twitter to express my feelings about this round up discussion and he mention that "a live panel is not an easy exercise (specially on Zoom)" and of course underlining that it was his first time doing it, but from my very personal point of view you managed very well, in this cases one of the most important things to keep in mind is to give space to your guests and you definitely mastered that bit! Very well done! <3

#Selected By Guaizine #showstudio #MFW #menswear #Pierre A. M'Pelé

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pixelpoppers · 2 years ago

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Toonstruck, Telltale, and Ken Williams

Recently I was chatting with friends about this article: Toonstruck (or, A Case Study in the Death of Adventure Games)

It's an interesting retrospective, especially for people like my friends and me who grew up on Sierra and LucasArts adventure games but lacked the perspective to understand the genre's decline in the mid-to-late 90's. It pins at least part of the downfall on an adherence to a vision of games as interactive cinema, as championed by Sierra's Ken Williams. Toonstruck in particular was an overoptimistic overinvestment in this vision that went way past deadline and over budget (though this write-up also makes it sound pretty fun and makes me want to finally get it off my backlog and play it).

In our conversation, my friend asked me, "With some distance, what do you think about Telltale's attempt at a revival?" I turned out to have a lot to say about this.

I was going to start by saying I haven't actually played any Telltale games, but that's not quite true. I just haven't played any of the ones people think of. I played Poker Night at the Inventory (very much not an adventure game), Puzzle Agent and Puzzle Agent 2 (kind of adventure games but not really, closer to Professor Layton-style narratively-wrapped puzzle compilations), and the first two chapters of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (an early not-super-well-known-or-regarded part of the revival).

That said, there are a couple different angles to address here. First, one of the major flaws of the Ken Williams vision as described in the Toonstruck write-up is that at the time, making that kind of game was more expensive than making movies and had much worse-looking results. Neither of those things is anywhere near as true anymore. Tech has advanced on both sides so that kind of game would be much easier and cheaper to make now and people could more easily view it on nice big screens in high resolution with lots of colors and stuff.

There's a sort of rising-tide-lifts-all-boats effect from tech advancement in games. I think my friend said this before me, but as a rule of thumb, anything that's AAA today can be replicated by a small indie team in ten years and by a single person in another ten. So as games-in-general become more mainstream and it becomes easier to reach niche audiences, it's inevitable that things that used to be AAA mainstays and then declined get revived as indie/niche later on. I'd expect to see most once-popular genres eventually get reborn with proportionally smaller teams and lower budgets but similar (or even superior) levels of quality.

Adventure games absolutely did that, even aside from Telltale. Telltale just ended up being maybe the best-known studio for it. Which brings us to the second angle I want to get into: Telltale's specific approach.

The first few adventure games they made (Sam & Max, Strong Bad, etc.) got some notice because they were licensed IPs with built-in fanbases. But my understanding is that their gameplay, writing, and puzzle design was actually basically... standard/middling. The effect was just: here are some more adventure games. That genre you knew is back now. Not evolved over the intervening time, except in that the tech has improved and they used the episodic model. So the games were only ever going to appeal to the people who'd already liked adventure games as they'd previously existed. Which is very much a niche, especially in today's larger market with more alternatives. (Even I only played the first two episodes of Strong Bad.)

And then Telltale made The Walking Dead.

This was significant in a couple of ways - one, it was a currently popular property rather than a nostalgia one, so it got the attention of more new players. And then, those players (as well as reviewers/influencers/tastemakers) liked what they found and talked about it, because it also had a shiny new gameplay formula.

This is where it becomes relevant that I haven't actually played any of these games, because I can't speak from experience. But my understanding is that The Walking Dead moved its focus from puzzles to characters, relationships, and consequences. It was less about vacuuming up items and then clicking everything on everything else, and more about getting to know these characters and then making choices that have effects on them that you then get to see play out (which also meant that the episodic setup actually became beneficial instead of just a quirk of the business model). The writing was also quite good, as it would need to be to actually support that formula effectively.

The game was a huge success. And it was superficially similar to adventure games of yore, and Telltale was that company that makes adventure games, so it kind of got lumped in as one in the popular consciousness. But I feel like this is when Telltale actually pivoted from just "doing the old kind of game again" to pushing the format forward.

The Walking Dead looked around at what you could do in the modern landscape with modern tech and actually took advantage of it. It was like, "Hey, we can have voice acting and animations where you can actually see facial expressions and body language. We can actually tell emotional stories now and not just rely on jokes that work in text." (It also did some internet stuff on top, I think? I want to say there was a thing where when you finished a chapter you got to see how many people made the same choices you did, which was good for social media and helped the game spread farther.)

So, this is the game that made Telltale blow up... in both senses, as I understand it. What happened was basically the same thing that happened at Halfbrick after Jetpack Joyride, and probably at many small studios that had a sudden hit. The sudden success attracted people who smelled money rather than sharing the creators' vision who then pushed the company into going all-in on trying to catch that lighting in a bottle again and milk it before it ran out.

Telltale rode on a great reputation for a while just on the strength of that one game. While I haven't played them, my understanding is that Telltale then basically started churning out more games with the exact same formula as The Walking Dead for various other licenses, and there was a period where people assumed they'd be good because The Walking Dead was so good, but largely they weren't. I'm sure different people would give you different rankings but I've heard that basically the only other good game they made was Tales from the Borderlands. (And maybe The Wolf Among Us.) The later you go, the more universally their games were considered bad, and ultimately they shut down.

Telltale veterans are now at other places doing things like Star Trek: Resurgence. (From their FAQ: "Star Trek: Resurgence is created by Dramatic Labs, an independent collaboration of 20+ former Telltale writers, developers, designers, artists, and producers. Star Trek: Resurgence will be familiar to fans of Telltale's unique style of gameplay, but it also brings some welcome additions and refinements from Dramatic Labs." I'm really keeping my fingers crossed for this one.)

There are still standard-bearers for the Telltale-like evolution of adventure games. The most notable are probably Quantic Dream (Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Detroit: Become Human), Supermassive (Until Dawn, The Quarry), and Dontnod (Life is Strange, etc.) These studios don't usually get lumped in with Telltale, for a few reasons, but honestly I think you could reasonably argue that the natural categories here are old-school Sierra or LucasArts point-and-clicks in one bucket, and Telltale/Quantic/Supermassive/Dontnod/etc. in another bucket that hews much closer to Ken Williams' vision of the future of adventure games.

It's also worth noting that there are other buckets here: hidden object games are another evolutionary offshoot that change up the emphasis in a different way and which have been thriving in their own niche for quite a long time.

So, Telltale brought adventure games back into the mainstream spotlight and then faded away, but the revival itself started before Telltale and has outlasted it. There are still other small studios making old-school adventure games, in that niche-rebirth way I mentioned before, and others making other niche offshoots like hidden object games. And other larger studios took notice of the ways The Walking Dead actually did evolve the formula and have continued to push that envelope in their own ways. Even if most people don't think of the results as "adventure games", I think they're showing that Ken Williams's vision was ahead of its time and is now coming to fruition with exciting results.

#adventure games #telltale #toonstruck #sierra #ken williams #the digital antiquarian

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listoriented · 7 years ago

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Brigador: Up-Armored Edition

I write to you from a friend's living room. This is maybe the third time I've started this post - the first time I was in a (pretty shit) cafe, where I remembered that I still have issues to sort out re: feeling self-conscious about doing writing in public, while the next attempt was at the kitchen table of a different friend on the other side of Melbourne to where I sit now. The point I wish to not-so-cleverly communicate is that I'm on the move again, the vagary of conditions of being mobile and staying with friends slightly less conducive to mouse and keyboard games like, pertinent example, Brigador, which this here blog post is (a little superficially) about. I should add that even though I didn't bring a mouse with me, there is definitely a mouse here that I could borrow (sitting right in front of me, in fact. Should I take a photo? No), and that it wouldn't be too hard to temporarily shift e.g. the stationary, tobacco, textbooks (but probably not the 1000 piece puzzle which if not finished seems very close to it), move this laptop from my actual lap and onto the table, plug in and play. But I'm starting to realise how much gaming is a hobby of domestic interior comfort for me. The space comes first, then the habit. Arguably/ideally it should be the other way around.

Sometimes life chooses when you're finished with the game - is a thing I wanted to write, leaning into the wince, extra helpings of cheese, melodrama leaking down my face, although even then it’s a painful simplification. It's more that mix of circumstance with the self-determined pressure of like, how long you should spend on any one game in a dumb myopic self-indulgent project versus an ongoing desire to slip in diary snippets while making it first and foremost about the game and also, like, not getting bogged down in personal shit. With Brigador I had, back in Canberra, almost - ! - finished the campaign, anyway, though a bit of last-minute research told me this whole campaign mode that I'd been playing was a more recent addition (the 2017 "up-armoured" part, in fact) to the game, and is kinda meant as a large tutorial section to the game proper, which is (I think) a freelance, permadeathy, scores and upgrades situation. Silly me for assuming.

Brigador is a - here, do you like descriptors specific to videogames and nothing else? - cyberpunk isometric bullet-hell mech shootybanger. You WASD your mech around the map, mouse-aiming at specific targets and enemy mechs/infantry while trying to not get blown up. The mechs can be slow and clunky, fast and fragile, with a few different weapon options and special abilities. It's set on a planet (I think?) called Solo Nobre, where there are lots of factions and loyalties and uh... I don't know. There was a lot of competently written flavour text for each mission. I dutifully read all of it but I wouldn't know how to go about paraphrasing the narrative (if there is any).

At a systems level though Brigador is, like, surprisingly solid. Fuck it. I’ll say it. It’s good. It’s a good game. It's endearingly simple, utterly mindless fun. The mechs aren't much to look at, but they have a real sense of weight to them - the heavy ones are almost painfully slow, while the lighter ones float effortlessly across the grid. There's enough control and tactical variability there that you could get quite a lot of mileage out of it; I found the heavy mechs with big guns generally easier to pass missions with, while I suspect the stealthy and/or zippy ones might take a bit more practice to use without meeting certain failure. Every building, wall, barrier in the game is destructible, which is a bit gimmicky but also, good. Also, the cannon fire is backed by some really decent clattering sound effect work, while the industrial synth backing track escalates in tempo as the pewpew gets hectic.

It doesn't seem like much to look at, at first, with a weird mixture of repeating doodads, lo-fi polygon shapes with newer engine textures making it seem like it belonged to no particular place and time. But even this I came around to. There's a restrained but wonderful use of neon/fluoro, against the ever drab industrial backgrounds. I quite liked the shadowy, half-lit streets and the renditions of retro-future industry, even while it was difficult to see the neighbourhoods and commercial districts that dotted the game’s story as anything other than open-plan mazes with a few illuminated but-otherwise-meaningless targets.

To be in Brigador is to be passing a moment just fine. And that's kind of about it. That's about it with a lot of games, I guess, although there's a purity of having basically-nothing-else present here. Nothing to think about. I think, particularly when I started to struggle with some of the longer missions, sometimes insta-killing my mech by driving into an unseen gas-station or similar (some of these are not well marked) right at the end of the mission and thereby having to repeat the whole thing again, swearing at the computer and the game and myself but also not really caring, I felt a heightened awareness of the futility of all this which, yeah, is nothing new, but I mainly only feel it when I play shittier, less altogether well-glued games than this one. Like, what is the point, actually? Brigador is functionally excellent; a pretty effective waste of time. How many times can I come to this particular conclusion about a game? For the lifetime of this blog.

When/Where: Brigador: Up Armoured Edition was in the June 2017 Humble Monthly. This is the first time a game from Humble Monthly has come up, I think, and it's also coincidentally from the first Monthly I got (after a long time of being like, no, that’s stupid). I think the carrot here was Stellaris, which predictably I still haven't had a proper go with, a year later.

Who: It was developed by Stellar Jockeys [official site], a four-man team across Illinois and Washington State (I know where these places are because America is everything even though I've never been there, hi). The game originally hit early access in 2015, full market in 2016, and the Up-Armoured re-release was June 2017 (same time as it was bundled with the monthly).

Duration: I played it for...7 hours. I unlocked 6 out of 63 achievements (wow so few) and one of those was for accidentally opening the console.

up next is Broken Age, beginning a run of adventure games being four of the next five in the list. Expect interrupted business as always.

#game61 #brigador #brigador: up-armored edition #mechs #bullethell #stellar jockeys #humble monthly #isometric

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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What Alternate Reality Games Teach Us About the Dangerous Appeal of QAnon

This story was originally published on mssv.net by Adrian Hon (@adrianhon)

The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory is so sprawling, it’s hard to know where people join. Last week, it was 5G cell towers, this week it’s Wayfair; who knows what next week will bring? But QAnon’s followers always seem to begin their journey with the same refrain: “I’ve done my research.”

I’d heard that line before. In early 2001, the marketing for Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, A.I., had just begun. YouTube wouldn’t launch for another four years, so you had to be eagle-eyed to spot the unusual credit next to Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, and Frances O’Connor: Jeanine Salla, the movie’s “Sentient Machine Therapist.”

Close-up of the A.I. movie poster

Soon after, Ain’t It Cool News (AICN) posted a tip from a reader:

“Type her name in the Google.com search engine, and see what sites pop up…pretty cool stuff! Keep up the good work, Harry!! –ClaviusBase”

(Yes, in 2001 Google was so new you had to spell out its web address.)

The Google results began with Jeanine Salla’s homepage but led to a whole network of fictional sites. Some were futuristic versions of police websites or lifestyle magazines; others were inscrutable online stores and hacked blogs. A couple were in German and Japanese. In all, over twenty sites and phone numbers were listed.

By the end of the day, the websites racked up 25 million hits, all from a single AICN article suggesting readers ‘do their research’. It later emerged they were part of one of the first-ever alternate reality games (ARG), The Beast, developed by Microsoft to promote Spielberg’s movie.

The way I’ve described it here, The Beast sounds like enormous fun. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a doorway into 2142 filled with websites and phone numbers and puzzles, with runaway robots who need your help and even live events around the world? But consider how much work it required to understand the story and it begins to sound less like “watching TV” fun and more like “painstaking research” fun. Along with tracking dozens of websites that updated in real time, you had to solve lute tablature puzzles, decode base 64 messages, reconstruct 3D models of island chains that spelt out messages, and gather clues from newspaper and TV adverts across the US.

This purposeful yet bewildering complexity is the complete opposite of what many associate with conventional popular entertainment, where every bump in your road to enjoyment has been smoothed away in the pursuit of instant engagement and maximal profit. But there’s always been another kind of entertainment that appeals to different people at different times, one that rewards active discovery, the drawing of connections between clues, the delicious sensation of a hunch that pays off after hours or days of work. Puzzle books, murder mysteries, adventure games, escape rooms, even scientific research—they all aim for the same spot.

What was new in The Beast and the ARGs that followed it was less the specific puzzles and stories they incorporated, but the sheer scale of the worlds they realised—so vast and fast-moving that no individual could hope to comprehend them. Instead, players were forced to cooperate, sharing discoveries and solutions, exchanging ideas, and creating resources for others to follow. I’d know: I wrote a novel-length walkthrough of The Beast when I was meant to be studying for my degree at Cambridge.

QAnon is not an ARG. It’s a dangerous conspiracy theory, and there are lots of ways of understanding conspiracy theories without ARGs. But QAnon pushes the same buttons that ARGs do, whether by intention or by coincidence. In both cases, “do your research” leads curious onlookers to a cornucopia of brain-tingling information.

In other words, maybe QAnon is… fun?

ARGs never made it big. They came too early and It’s hard to charge for a game that you stumble into through a Google search. But maybe their purposely-fragmented, internet-native, community-based form of storytelling and puzzle-solving was just biding its time…

This blog post expands on the ideas in my Twitter thread about QAnon and ARGs, and incorporates many of the valuable replies. Please note, however, that I’m not a QAnon expert and I’m not a scholar of conspiracy theories. I’m not even the first to compare QAnon to LARPs and ARGs.

But my experience as lead designer of Perplex City, one of the world’s most popular and longest-running ARGs, gives me a special perspective on QAnon’s game-like nature. My background as a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist also gives me insight into what motivates people.

Today, I run Six to Start, best known for Zombies, Run!, an audio-based augmented reality game with half a million active players, and I’m writing a book about the perils and promise of gamification.

It’s Like We Did It On Purpose

Perplex City “Ascendancy Point” Story Arc

When I was designing Perplex City, I loved sketching out new story arcs. I’d create intricate chains of information and clues for players to uncover, colour-coding for different websites and characters. There was a knack to having enough parallel strands of investigation going on so that players didn’t feel railroaded, but not so many that they were overwhelmed. It was a particular pleasure to have seemingly unconnected arcs intersect after weeks or months.

Merely half of the “Q-web“

No-one would mistake the clean lines of my flowcharts for the snarl of links that makes up a QAnon theory, but the principles are similar: one discovery leading to the next. Of course, these two flowcharts are very different beasts. The QAnon one is an imaginary, retrospective description of supposedly-connected data, while mine is a prescriptive network of events I would design.

Except that’s not quite true. In reality, Perplex City players didn’t always solve our puzzles as quickly as we intended them to, or they became convinced their incorrect solution was correct, or embarrassingly, our puzzles were broken and had no solution at all. In those cases we had to rewrite the story on the fly.

When this happens in most media, you just hold up your hands and say you made a mistake. In video games, you can issue an online update and hope no-one’s the wiser. But in ARGs, a public correction would shatter the uniquely-prolonged collective suspension of disbelief in the story. This was thought to be so integral to the appeal of ARGs, it was termed TINAG, or “This is Not a Game.”

So when we messed up in Perplex City, we tried mightily to avoid editing websites, a sure sign this was, in fact, a game. Instead, we’d fix it by adding new storylines and writing through the problem (it helped to have a crack team of writers and designers, including Naomi Alderman, Andrea Phillips, David Varela, Dan Hon, Jey Biddulph, Fi Silk, Eric Harshbarger, and many many others).

We had a saying when these diversions worked out especially well: “It’s like we did it on purpose.”

Every ARG designer can tell a similar war story. Here’s Josh Fialkov, writer for the Lonelygirl15 ARG/show:

“Our fans/viewers would build elaborate (and pretty neat) theories and stories around the stories we’d already put together and then we’d merge them into our narrative, which would then engage them more. The one I think about the most is we were shooting something on location and we’re run and gunning. We fucked up and our local set PA ended up in the background of a long selfie shot. We had no idea. It was 100% a screw up. The fans became convinced the character was in danger. And then later when that character revealed herself as part of the evil conspiracy — that footage was part of the audiences proof that she was working with the bad guys all along — “THATS why he was in the background!” They literally found a mistake – made it a story point. And used it as evidence of their own foresight into the ending — despite it being, again, us totally being exhausted and sloppy. And at the time hundreds of thousands of people were participating and contributing to a fictional universe and creating strands upon strands.”

Conspiracy theories and cults evince the same insouciance when confronted with inconsistencies or falsified predictions; they can always explain away errors with new stories and theories. What’s special about QAnon and ARGs is that these errors can be fixed almost instantly, before doubt or ridicule can set in. And what’s really special about QAnon is how it’s absorbed all other conspiracy theories to become a kind of ur-conspiracy theory such that seems pointless to call out inconsistencies. In any case, who would you even be calling out when so many QAnon theories come from followers rather than “Q”?

Yet the line between creator and player in ARGs has also long been blurry. That tip from “ClaviusBase” to AICN that catapulted The Beast to massive mainstream coverage? The designers more or less admitted it came from them. Indeed, there’s a grand tradition of ARG “puppetmasters” (an actual term used by devotees) sneaking out from “behind the curtain” (ditto) to create “sockpuppet accounts” in community forums to seed clues, provide solutions, and generally chivvy players along the paths they so carefully designed.

As an ARG designer, I used to take a hard line against this kind of cheating but in the years since, I’ve mellowed somewhat, mostly because it can make the game more fun, and ultimately, because everyone expects it these days. That’s not the case with QAnon.

Yes, anyone who uses 4chan and 8chan understands that anonymity is baked into the system such that posters frequently create entire threads where they argue against themselves in the guise of anonymous users who are impossible to distinguish or trace back to a single individual – but do the more casual QAnon followers know that?

Local Fame

A Beautiful Mind

Pop culture’s conspiracy theorist sits in a dark basement stringing together photos and newspaper clippings on their "crazy wall." On the few occasions this leads to useful results, it’s an unenviable pursuit. Anyone choosing such an existence tends to be shunned by society.

But this ignores one gaping fact: piecing together theories is really satisfying. Writing my walkthrough for The Beast was rewarding and meaningful, appreciated by an enthusiastic community in a way that my molecular biology essays most certainly were not. Online communities have long been dismissed as inferior in every way to “real” friendships, an attenuated version that’s better than nothing, but not something that anyone should choose. Yet ARGs and QAnon (and games and fandom and so many other things) demonstrate there’s an immediacy and scale and relevance to online communities that can be more potent and rewarding than a neighbourhood bake sale. This won’t be news to most of you, but I think it’s still news to decision-makers in traditional media and politics.

Good ARGs are deliberately designed with puzzles and challenges that require unusual talents—I designed one puzzle that required a good understanding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs—with problems so large that they require crowdsourcing to solve, such that all players feel like welcome and valued contributors.

Needless to say, that feeling is missing from many people’s lives:

“ARGs are generally a showcase for special talent that often goes unrecognized elsewhere. I have met so many wildly talented people with weird knowledge through them.”

If you’re first to solve a puzzle or make a connection, you can attain local fame in ARG communities, as Dan Hon, COO at Mind Candy (makers of the Perplex City ARG), notes. The vast online communities for TV shows like Lost and Westworld, with their purposefully convoluted mystery box plots, also reward those who guess twists early, or produce helpful explainer videos. Yes, the reward is “just” internet points in the form of Reddit upvotes, but the feeling of being appreciated is very real. It’s no coincidence that Lost and Westworld both used ARGs to promote their shows.

Wherever you have depth in storytelling or content or mechanics, you’ll find the same kind of online communities. Games like Bloodborne, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Dwarf Fortress, Animal Crossing, Eve Online, and Elite Dangerous, they all share the same race for discovery. These discoveries eventually become processed into explainer videos and Reddit posts that are more accessible for wider audiences.

The same has happened with modern ARGs, where explainer videos have become so compelling they rack up more views than the ARGs have players (not unlike Twitch). Michael Andersen, owner of the Alternate Reality Gaming Network news site, is a fan of this trend, but wonders about its downside—with reference to conspiracy theorists:

“[W]hen you’re reading (or watching) a summary of an ARG? All of the assumptions and logical leaps have been wrapped up and packaged for you, tied up with a nice little bow. Everything makes sense, and you can see how it all flows together. Living it, though? Sheer chaos. Wild conjectures and theories flying left and right, with circumstantial evidence and speculation ruling the day. Things exist in a fugue state of being simultaneously true-and-not-true, and it’s only the accumulation of evidence that resolves it. And acquiring a “knack” for sifting through theories to surface what’s believable is an extremely valuable skill—both for actively playing ARGs, and for life in general.And sometimes, I worry that when people consume these neatly packaged theories that show all the pieces coming together, they miss out on all those false starts and coincidences that help develop critical thinking skills. …because yes, conspiracy theories try and offer up those same neat packages that attempt to explain the seemingly unexplained. And it’s pretty damn important to learn how groups can be led astray in search of those neatly wrapped packages.”

“SPEC”

I’m a big fan of the SCP Foundation, a creative writing website set within a shared universe not unlike The X-Files. Its top-rated stories rank among the best science fiction and horror I’ve read. A few years ago, I wrote my own (very silly) story, SCP-3993, where New York’s ubiquitous LinkNYC internet kiosks are cover for a mysterious reality-altering invasion.

CITYBRIDGE/NYC

Like the rest of SCP, this was all in good fun, but I recently discovered LinkNYC is tangled up in QAnon conspiracy theories. To be fair, you can say the same thing about pretty much every modern technology, but it’s not surprising their monolith-like presence caught conspiracy theorists’ attention as it did mine.

It’s not unreasonable to be creeped out by LinkNYC. In 2016, the New York Civil Liberties Union wrote to the mayor about “the vast amount of private information retained by the LinkNYC system and the lack of robust language in the privacy policy protecting users against unwarranted government surveillance.” Two years later, kiosks along Third Avenue in Midtown mysteriously blasted out a slowed-down version of the Mister Softee theme song. So there’s at least some cause for speculation. The problem is when speculation hardens into reality.

Not long after the AICN post, The Beast’s players set up a Yahoo Group mailing list called Cloudmakers, named after a boat in the story. As the number of posts rose to dozens and then hundreds per day, it became obvious to list moderators (including me) that some form of organisation was in order. One rule we established was that posts should include a prefix in their subject so members could easily distinguish website updates from puzzle solutions.

My favourite prefix was “SPEC,” a catch-all for any kind of unfounded speculation, most of which was fun nonsense but some of which ended up being true. There were no limits on what or how much you could post, but you always had to use the prefix so people could ignore it. Other moderated communities have similar guidelines, with rationalists using their typically long-winded “epistemic status” metadata.

Absent this kind of moderation, speculation ends up overwhelming communities since it’s far easier and more fun to bullshit than do actual research. And if speculation is repeated enough times, if it’s finessed enough, it can harden into accepted fact, leading to devastating and even fatal consequences.

I’ve personally been the subject of this process thanks to my work in ARGs—not just once, but twice.

The first occasion was fairly innocent. One of our more famous Perplex City puzzles, Billion to One, was a photo of a man. That’s it. The challenge was to find him. Obviously, we were riffing on the whole “six degrees of separation” concept. Some thought it’d be easy, but I was less convinced. Sure enough, fourteen years on, the puzzle is still unsolved, but not for lack of trying. Every so often, the internet rediscovers the puzzle amid a flurry of YouTube videos and podcasts; I can tell whenever this happens because people start DMing me on Twitter and Instagram.

This literally came a few days ago

A clue in the puzzle is the man’s name, Satoshi. It is not a rare name, and it happens to be same as the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. So of course people think Perplex City’s Satoshi created bitcoin. Not a lot of people, to be fair, but enough that I get DMs about it every week. But it’s all pretty innocent, like I said.

More concerning is my presumed connection to Cicada 3301, a mysterious group that recruited codebreakers through very difficult online puzzles. Back in 2011, my company developed a pseudo-ARG for the BBC Two factual series, The Code, all about mathematics. This involved planting clues into the show itself, along with online educational games and a treasure hunt.

To illustrate the concept of prime numbers, The Code explored the gestation period of cicadas. We had no hand in the writing of the show; we got the script and developed our ARG around it. But this was enough to create a brand new conspiracy theory, featuring yours truly:

My bit starts around 20 minutes in:

Interviewer: Why [did you make a puzzle about] cicadas?

Me: Cicadas are known for having a gestation period which is linked to prime numbers. Prime numbers are at the heart of nature and the heart of mathematics.

Interviewer: That puzzle comes out in June 2011.

Me: Yeah.

Interviewer: Six months later, Cicada 3301 makes its international debut.

Me: It's a big coincidence.

Interviewer: There are some people who have brought up the fact that whoever's behind Cicada 3301 would have to be a very accomplished game maker.

Me: Sure.

Interviewer: You would be a candidate to be that person.

Me: That's true, I mean, Cicada 3301 has a lot in common with the games we've made. I think that one big difference (chuckles) is that normally when we make alternate reality games, we do it for money. And it's not so clear to understand where the funding for Cicada 3301 is coming from.

Clearly this was all just in fun – I knew it and the interviewer knew it. That’s why I agreed to take part. But does everyone watching this understand that? There’s no “SPEC” tag on the video. At least a few commenters are taking it seriously:

I am the “ARG guy” in question

I’m not worried, but I’d be lying if I wasn’t a touch concerned that Cicada 3301 now lies squarely in the QAnon vortex and in the “Q-web“:

Here’s a good interview with the creator of the “Q-web”

My defence that the cicada puzzle in The Code was “a big coincidence” (albeit delivered with an unfortunate shit-eating grin) didn’t hold water. In the conspiracy theorest mindset, no such thing exists:

“According to Michael Barkun, emeritus professor of political science at Syracuse University, three core principles characterize most conspiracy theories. Firstly, the belief that nothing happens by accident or coincidence. Secondly, that nothing is as it seems: The “appearance of innocence” is to be suspected. Finally, the belief that everything is connected through a hidden pattern.”

These are helpful beliefs when playing an ARG or watching a TV show designed with twists and turns. It’s fun to speculate and to join seemingly disparate ideas, especially when the creators encourage and reward this behaviour. It’s less helpful when conspiracy theorists “yes, and…” each other into shooting up a pizza parlour or burning down 5G cell towers.

Because there is no coherent QAnon community in the same sense as the Cloudmakers, there’s no convention of “SPEC” tags. In their absence, YouTube has added annotated QAnon videos with links to its Wikipedia article, and Twitter has banned 7,000 accounts and restricted 150,000 more, among other actions. Supposedly, Facebook is planning to do the same.

These are useful steps but will not stop QAnon from spreading in social media comments or private chat groups or unmoderated forums. It’s not something we can reasonably hope for, and I don’t think there’s any technological solution (e.g. browser extensions) either. The only way to stop people from mistaking speculation from fact is for them to want to stop.

Cryptic

It’s always nice to have a few mysteries for players to speculate on in an ARG, if only because it helps them pass the time while the poor puppetmasters scramble to sate their insatiable demand for more website updates and puzzles. A good mystery can keep a community guessing for, as Lost did with its numbers or Game of Thrones with Jon Snow’s parentage. But these mysteries always have to be balanced against specifics, lest the whole story dissolve into a puddle of mush; for as much we derided Lost for the underwhelming conclusion to its mysteries, no-one would’ve watched in the first place if the episode-to-episode storytelling wasn’t so strong.

The downside of being too mysterious in Perplex City is that cryptic messages often led players on wild goose chases such that they completely ignored entire story arcs in favour of pursuing their own theories. This was bad for us because we had a pretty strict timetable that we needed our story to play out on, pinned against the release of our physical puzzle cards that funded the entire enterprise. If players took too long to find the $200,000 treasure at the conclusion of the story, we might run out of money.

QAnon can favour cryptic messages because, as far as I know, they don’t have a specific timeline or goal in mind, let alone a production budget or paid staff. Not only is there no harm in followers misinterpreting messages, but it’s a strength: followers can occupy themselves with their own spin-off theories far better than “Q” can. Dan Hon notes:

“For every ARG I’ve been involved in and ones my friends have been involved in, communities always consume/complete/burn through content faster than you can make it, when you’re doing a narrative-based game. This content generation/consumption/playing asymmetry is, I think, just a fact. But QAnon “solved” it by being able to co-opt all content that already exists and … encourages and allows you to create new content that counts and is fair play in-the-game.”

But even QAnon needs some specificity, hence their frequent references to actual people, places, events, and so on.

A brief aside on designing very hard puzzles

It was useful to be cryptic when I needed to control the speed at which players solved especially consequential puzzles, like the one revealing where our $200,000 treasure was buried. For story and marketing purposes, we wanted players to be able to find it as soon as they had access to all 256 puzzle cards, which we released in three waves. We also wanted players to feel like they were making progress before they had all the cards and we didn’t want them to find the location the minute they had the last card.

My answer was to represent the location as the solution to multiple cryptic puzzles. One puzzle referred to the Jurassic strata in the UK, which I split across the background of 14 cards. Another began with a microdot revealing which order to arrange triple letters I’d hidden on a bunch of cards. By performing mod arithmetic on the letter/number values, you would arrive at 1, 2, 3 or 4, corresponding to the four DNA nucleotides. If you understood the triplets as codons for amino acids, they became letters. These letters led you to the phrase “Duke of Burgundy”, the name of a butterfly whose location, when combined with the Jurassic strata, would help you narrow down the location of the treasure.

The nice thing about this convoluted sequence is that we could provide additional online clues to help the players community when they got stuck. The point being, you can’t make an easy puzzle harder, but you can make a hard puzzle easier.

Beyond ARGs

It can feel crass to compare ARGs to a conspiracy theory that’s caused so much harm. But this reveals the crucial difference between them: in QAnon, the stakes so high, any action is justified. If you truly believe an online store or a pizza parlour is engaging in child trafficking and the authorities are complicit, extreme behaviour is justified.

Gabriel Roth, editorial director for audio at Slate, extends this idea:

“What QAnon has that ARGs didn’t have is the claim of factual truth; in that sense it reminds me of the Bullshit Anecdotal Memoir wave of the 90s and early 00s. If you have a story based on real life, but you want to make it more interesting, the correct thing to do is change the names of the people and make it as interesting as you like and call it fiction. The insight of the Bullshit Anecdotal Memoirists (I’m thinking of James Frey and Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris) was that you could call it nonfiction and readers would like it much better because it would have the claim of actual factual truth, wowee!! And it worked! How much more engaging and addictive is an immersive, participatory ARG when it adds that unique frisson you can only get with the claim of factual truth? And bear in mind that ARG-scale stories aren’t about mere personal experiences—they operate on a world-historical scale.”

ARGs’ playfulness with the truth and their sometimes-imperceptible winking of This Is Not A Game (accusations Lonelygirl15 was a hoax) is only the most modern incarnation of epistolary storytelling. In that context, immersive and realistic stories have long elicited extreme reactions, like the panic incited by Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds (often exaggerated, to be fair).

We don’t have to wonder what happens when an ARG community meets a matter of life and death. Not long after The Beast concluded, the 9/11 attacks happened. A small number of posters in the Cloudmakers mailing list suggested the community use its skills to “solve” the question of who was behind the attack.

The brief but intense discussion that ensued has become a cautionary tale of ARG communities getting carried away and being unable to distinguish fiction from reality. In reality, the community and the moderators quickly shut down the idea as being impractical, insensitive, and very dangerous. “Cloudmakers tried to solve 9/11” is a great story, but it’s completely false.

Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for the poster child for online sleuthing gone wrong, the r/findbostonbombers subreddit. There’s a parallel between the essentially unmoderated, anonymous theorists of r/findbostonbombers and those in QAnon: neither feel any responsibility for spreading unsupported speculation as fact. What they do feel is that anything should be solvable, as Laura Hall, immersive environment and narrative designer, describes:

“There’s a general sense of, ‘This should be solveable/findable/etc’ that you see in lots of reddit communities for unsolved mysteries and so on. The feeling that all information is available online, that reality and truth must be captured/in evidence somewhere”

There’s truth in that feeling. There is a vast amount of information online, and sometimes it is possible to solve “mysteries”, which makes it hard to criticise people for trying, especially when it comes to stopping perceived injustices. But it’s the sheer volume of information online that makes it so easy and so tempting and so fun to draw spurious connections.

That joy of solving and connecting and sharing and communication can do great things, and it can do awful things. As Josh Fialkov, writer for Lonelygirl15, says:

That brain power negatively focused on what [conspiracy theorists] perceive as life and death (but is actually crassly manipulated paranoia) scares the living shit out of me.

What ARGs Can Teach Us

Can we make “good ARGs”? Could ARGs inoculate people against conspiracy theories like QAnon?

The short answer is: No. When it comes to games that are educational and fun, you usually have to pick one, not both—and I say that as someone who thinks he’s done a decent job at making “serious games” over the years. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it’s really hard, and I doubt any such ARG would get played by the right audience anyway.

The long answer: I’m writing a book about the perils and promise of gamification. Come back in a year or two.

For now, here’s a medium-sized answer. No ARG can heal the deep mistrust and fear and economic and spiritual malaise that underlies QAnon and other dangerous conspiracy theories, any more than a book or a movie can solve racism. There are hints at ARG-like things that could work, though—not in directly combatting QAnon’s appeal, but in channeling people’s energy and zeal of community-based problem-solving toward better causes.

Take The COVID Tracking Project, an attempt to compile the most complete data available about COVID-19 in the U.S. Every day, volunteers collect the latest numbers on tests, cases, hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every state and territory. In the absence of reliable governmental figures, it’s become one of the best sources not just in the U.S., but in the world.

It’s also incredibly transparent. You can drill down into the raw data volunteers have collected on Google Sheets, view every line of code written on Github, and ask them questions on Slack. Errors and ambiguities in the data are quickly disclosed and explained rather than hidden or ignored. There’s something game-like in the daily quest to collect the best-quality data and to continually expand and improve the metrics being tracked. And like in the best ARGs, volunteers of all backgrounds and skills are welcomed. It’s one of the most impressive and well-organising reporting projects I’ve ever seen; “crowdsourcing” doesn’t even come close to describing its scale.

If you applied ARG skills to investigative journalism, you’d get something like Bellingcat, an an open-source intelligence group that discovered how Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down over Ukraine in 2014. Bellingcat’s volunteers painstakingly pieced together publicly-available information to determine MH17 was downed by a Buk missile launcher originating from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Rocket Brigade in Kursk, Russia. The Dutch-led international joint investigation team later came to the same conclusion.

Conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of trust. Today, people don’t trust authorities because authorities have repeatedly shown themselves to be unworthy of trust – misreporting or manipulating COVID-19 testing figures, delaying the publication of government investigations, burning records of past atrocities, and deploying unmarked federal forces. Perhaps authorities were just as untrustworthy twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago, but today we rightly expect more.

Mattathias Schwartz, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, believes it’s that lack of trust that leads people to QAnon:

“Q’s [followers] … are starving for information. Their willingness to chase bread crumbs is a symptom of ignorance and powerlessness. There may be something to their belief that the machinery of the state is inaccessible to the people. It’s hard to blame them for resorting to fantasy and esotericism, after all, when accurate information about the government’s current activities is so easily concealed and so woefully incomplete.”

So the goal cannot be to simply restore trust in existing authorities. Rather, I think it’s to restore faith in truth and knowledge itself. The COVID Tracking Project and Bellingcat help reveal truth by crowdsourcing information. They show their work via hypertext and open data, creating a structure upon which higher-level analysis and journalism can be built. And if they can’t find the truth, they’re willing to say so.

QAnon seems just as open. Everything is online. Every discussion, every idea, every theory is all joined together in a warped edifice where speculation becomes fact and fact leads to action. It’s thrilling to discover, and as you find new terms to Google and new threads to pull upon, you can feel just like a real researcher. And you can never get bored. There’s always new information to make sense of, always a new puzzle to solve, always a new enemy to take down.

QAnon fills the void of information that states have created—not with facts, but with fantasy. If we don’t want QAnon to fill that void, someone else has to. Government institutions can’t be relied upon to do this sustainably, given how underfunded and politicised they’ve become in recent years. Traditional journalism has also struggled against its own challenges of opacity and lack of resources. So maybe that someone is… us.

ARGs teach us that the search for knowledge and truth can be immensely rewarding, not in spite of their deliberately-fractured stories and near-impossible puzzles, but because of them. They teach us that communities can self-organise and self-moderate to take on immense challenges in a responsible way. And they teach us that people are ready and willing to volunteer to work if they’re welcomed, no matter their talent.

It’s hard to create these communities. They rely on software and tools that aren’t always free or easy to use. They need volunteers who have spare time to give and moderators who can be supported, financially and emotionally, through the struggles that always come. These communities already exist. They just need more help.

Despite the growing shadow of QAnon, I’m hopeful for the future. The beauty of ARGs and ARG-like communities isn’t their power to discover truth. It’s how they make the process of discovery so deeply rewarding.

What Alternate Reality Games Teach Us About the Dangerous Appeal of QAnon syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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metalgearkong · 7 years ago

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Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice - Review (PC, PS4)

Developed by Ninja Theory

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrafice can be categorized as a 3rd-person adventure game with an emphasis on narrative, sound design, and character. This game is developed by Ninja Theory, who’s past titles include DMC, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, and Heavenly Sword. Strangely, Hellblade was a game not given a physical release, meaning the only way to obtain it is by download off the PlayStation Store. It took me quite a long time to download the game once I bought it (for a generous $30 price tag) due to poor Wi-Fi where I live. Finally though, once the 22GBs were finished installing, I got to fire up what would be one of my favorite video game experiences of all time.

Hellblade has a refreshingly original concept: Senua, a Celtic warrior, is on a personal journey to Helheim to rescue the soul of her dead lover. The setting is somewhere in Viking territory of Northern medieval Europe. Senua suffers from a severe case of psychosis; She hears voices, experiences hallucinations, and has a hard time determining objective reality from her own projections. This is one of the only times I can remember a video game hero afflicted with a mental illness, and pulled off tastefully. Not only is this groundbreaking, but Ninja Theory went out of their way to ensure they were representing the mental condition accurately, and not holing back on representing the horror it gives many people.

Hellblade, like Ninja Theory’s other games, is a single-player, linear, story-driven game with little to offer outside of its campaign. Compared to many other big titles, this seems like the game has a lower value than other titles available in this day in age. Many studios such as Rockstar, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Square-Enix, and more, offer experiences which can last dozens or hundreds of hours. However, what determines value is subjective, and not all gamers have the time or commitment to play a single game for incredible swaths of time. Ninja Theory has always stuck by their formula of creating well designed, presentation-focused video games. Hellblade is no different.

Senua is taunted by the voices in her head, who range from being protagonistic or antagonistic toward Senua’s goals. The game has no heads-up-display, so don’t expect anything to be showing you where to go, button prompts, minimaps, or anything else to aid the player. This is a strictly linear experience, and not only does the player not need a display, its absence helps maintain immersion and atmosphere. What’s so clever about Hellblade is the representations of Senua’s psychosis are not purely cosmetic. Her voices help the player in leu of traditional video game indicators. For example, in a fight with more than one foe, a voice in Senua’s head will say “behind you!” or “get up! get up!” which both refer to keeping Senua alive, but also clue in the player to information they should know.

Hellblade is dominated by cut-scenes, melee combat, and environmental puzzle solving. This leads me to one of the only objective flaws I have about the game. Hellblade has several unique puzzle mechanics which are fun and interesting, often forcing you to pay attention to your environment and your senses. However, two or three of the puzzle types are used consistently throughout the entire 6-7 hour game. The puzzle you are solving at the very end of the game is the same kind of puzzle you learn at the very opening of the game. I wish Ninja Theory either would have cut such more of these puzzles out (especially late game) or would have come up with a few more ideas.

Hellblade is also a bit too limiting with movement at times, keeping the player sequestered along its path; I found myself blocked by invisible walls and not being able to jump on waist-high walls a bit too often.

Occasionally Senua will do some fighting when evil warriors stand in her way. I always enjoyed the fighting because the swings feel fluid, hit hard, and offer just enough variety and slashing fun to get you through this sort of game. Senua’s movements are graceful, and its fun to mix up the light and heavy attacks to see her acrobatics. The game also includes a combat slow-mo ability which nearly freezes enemies in place as you slice them down. I feel like this makes combat a little too easy, and is an ability that should have been unlocked closer to the end of the game.

Hellblade should be played with headphones, and I can’t recommend doing this enough. Ninja Theory specifically crafted the game to benefit from bi-directional sounds. Much of this incarnates in hearing Senua’s constant disembodied voices all around her, but you will also hear layers of environmental sounds you won’t catch on TV speakers. At one point Senua is exploring an underground mine. These underground corridors are shrouded in darkness, only lit by your own pitiful torchlight. Painful moans and other sounds echoing off the cave walls forced me to stop playing the game. This section was so truly terrifying, I couldn’t continue. The number of voices and creepy sounds from all directions and the quality of which they were recorded was almost too good. I had to wait until daylight and played with normal TV sound in order to get through this section later on.

Fittingly, this was a trial of “fear” for Senua, and it adequately frightened me, meaning if I was a Celtic warrior on the same task as her, that’s right about where I would have failed, returning home with my tail between my legs. This speaks to Hellblade’s greatest qualities which is the story it tells, the strength and depth of the protagonist, the audio and visual design, and the themes it teaches me. This is not only the best game Ninja Theory has made, Hellblade is one of the most important games in history. It respectfully and bravely tackles the taboo subject of mental illness in the video game medium. Experts and people with comparable illnesses approve of Hellblade and feel that Senua’s illusions, voices, and other symptoms are tastefully simulated.

A staff member, Melina Juergens, originally helping in testing motion capture, decided to be the character of Senua herself. The quality of performance capture is absolutely incredible, and has set a new bar for acting in the medium. She deserves the equivalent of an Oscar for what she and the developers have accomplished with the character of Senua. This is a must have for video game enthusiasts, and if it weren't for a couple small gameplay flaws, Hellblade all around would have been a near perfect experience. If you’re looking for a typical 100-hour bloated Triple-A game stuffed with pointless content and microtransactions, look elseware. This is an incredible example of a middle market video game which was made for all the right reasons. Support Ninja Theory, download Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrafice, and play it immediately

9/10

#hellblade #senuassacrafice #ninjatheory #psychosis #videogames #ps4 #exclusive #melinajuergens

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talenlee · 7 years ago

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Okay, so straight up, Sam and Max Hit The Road is one of my favourite games. It’s a point-and-click adventure game with some frustratingly obtuse puzzles. I don’t know if I can even recommend it as a game per se because the times I struggled with the solutions to its ridiculously obtuse view of the world are all so far in the past that I can’t imagine how anyone would solve them. Some of the puzzle solutions are positively arcane.

When you boil down a lot of point-and-click adventure games, they have one problem: Use key on door. In fact, sometimes games that tried to do something different (like Future War and Full Throttle) were criticised for the involvement of those other elements. In Sam and Max Hit The Road, there’s a handful of, y’know, bits and stuff designed to introduce other puzzles and problems, but none of the game is too hard once you grasp the thread of the game’s weird poke-it-and-see methodology.

So, right, as a game: It’s good, but it’s of its time. The GOG release brings automatic saves and windowed play and those are nice modern conveniences. Okay? Play it with a walkthrough nearby but don’t follow the walkthrough directly. Just use it when you’ve poked everything to laugh at the responses you find, but not to remain stranded in a narrative point for a while. I like it, I think it’s good, it’s cheap and it’s really funny.

And hey.

Now.

Let’s do the heck out of talking about Sam and Max Hit The Road.

Culture

Sam and Max Hit the Road is a game that really couldn’t be made today, and we know that because when Sam and Max got episodic content that content worked more or less at odds with the way the game felt, but more about that later when I talk about the sequels. Everything in the game had going for it was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle moments for its genre, for the gaming culture, and even for the company that made it.

It was made by Lucasarts, the only people who could comfortably make fun of Star Wars in the gaming sphere, who had access to some top-notch graphic assets (in the form of artists) and an engine that they knew inside and out. What’s more, that engine was really good at this one specific type of game and didn’t try to get weird or cute with it. They had the tools and the skills and the people and they had an idea for an intellectual property that was very much being built on the creative mind and work of one of the people working on the game rather than chasing a marketable franchise. Basicaly, Lucasarts had enough money and clout to make something nobody cared about before they started, and made it excellently enough that it endures even now some twenty-three years on.

While games like Day of the Tentacle and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis sought to represent a location or a single movie’s adventure narrative, Sam and Max Hit The Road wanted to make its whole story about a ridiculous road trip across an enormous country and show a resting state of considerable, constant weirdness. This meant that the game was about showing off a culture, and that meant that most of the game, for all that it’s about following an interruption to the status quo, is about representing a status quo that somehow all fits together – a default state. And that means you can look at Sam and Max as a little time capsule of the childhoods of the people who made it reflecting on the America they knew released into an America that was.

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Sam and Max represents a world that is pre-cellphone. It’s 1994. There are phone booths – and one factors into a puzzle. It’s pre-internet, too, and the world it depicts is the Weird America of that pre-internet life. If you journey across Sam and Max’s America, you’ll be treated to a series of roadside weirdnesses. Their starting point, a office in the big city, is crime-riddled and surrounded by degeneracy. There are gunfights at random, a store selling GUNS, LIQUOR, BABY NEEDS (which still makes me laugh) is on the corner, and violence ensues at almost all opportunities.

It’s when they’re pulled out of this needless depiction of 1990s inner-city crime and poverty that they streak across the country looking at this compulsively weird culture, and that culture is something that’s sort of faded. It’s a given in Sam and Max that there are UFOs and Bigfoots and roadside attractions with strange dark fates to them and tourist traps that are themselves, actually real things. There’s Jesse James’ severed hand in a jar and it’s just, y’know, there, in a carnival. There’s even a puzzle about finding a location on the map that lies between other, extremely ludicrous magical locations.

It’s this particular view of America’s middles and betweens as being populated by the unnatural simply forgotten by the cities that has faded in recent years. The era of the cellphone and the universal camera means that a lot of the things that Sam and Max jokes about existing are kind of past beliefs, with new, much more dark and hateful conspiracy theories replacing them.

There’s something childish about it, too. There’s something lovely about how you play with paper cutout dolls, or a diner placemat map, or that you can play Travel Carbomb (and that’s a name that aged poorly, fast). It’s a game that remembers being on these journeys as a passenger.

Values

There’s a lot of subversion in the oddness here as well. There are some locations that are literally interchangeable with one another – functionally identical spaces but for some minor, superficial changes. The Snuckeys are all the exact same locations, with the exact same key items and dialogue and puzzle solutions, a little subtle poke at the very nature of American tourist trap franchising.

Yet at the same time, this little corner of capitalist culture features a little glimpse of one of the other values that runs throughout Sam and Max Hit The Road: Happiness.

Whenever you meet people, broadly speaking they are doing okay. The story represents a whole range of people across the United States, mostly people who are working in touristed areas, doing menial jobs or thankless tasks… and they’re okay.

Most people aren’t happy, not wildly so, but they’re okay. There’s the Snuckeys employees, who are all identical and talk about having to comply with the brand’s standards, but they’re okay. They take pride in their work. They enjoy things in their work. There’s a man whose business flooded and he devised a solution. There’s food servers and store owners, there are tourists and hobbyists and yes, some bigfoots and people solving their day-to-day problems with rebranding efforts, and mostly, people are okay living their lives in their weird ways. There’s no apocalyptic sadness or unhappiness – there’s a certain joy for all these people who are just enjoying what they enjoy, doing what they do.

The thing that’s really interesting to me is the story only really represents a small number of people as being unhappy. In fact, specifically, there’s only one major character who both starts and ends the game unhappy, and that’s Conroy Bumpus, who is also depicted as being vain, self-obsessed, cruel and rich. Conroy built a monument to himself in his ranch and he spends much of the game disappointed and unhappy because he can’t have what he wants – a non-human humanoid to torture. The one other probably-wealthy person you see in the game is Evelynn Moriss, who is depicted as being a bit spacey but also using her wealth and position to benefit the bigfoots – who are her guests.

Narrative

Hell, let’s talk about story structure because, inexplicably, Sam and Max Hit the Road has a good one. I’ve spoken about how good stories that want to feel rooted to the real world are ones where there’s a single instigating event, like in Stranger Things. There’s a single instigatory event in the narrative, but without that instigating event, the other things in the story exist and would have existed in a sort of stasis. The Bigfoot party was going to happen whether or not Bruno showed up; Conroy Bumpus was always fooling around looking for a Bigfoot to add to his collection; and Sam and Max weren’t even going to do anything different with their day unless the instigatory event happened.

That event is Trixie, the Giraffe-necked girl, conscripting the Fire-breather to free Bruno, with whom she’d believed she was in love. Trixie is a lot of things (it’s kind of weird she’s white but I’m also super relieved she isn’t black), and her story is silly, but she’s still someone who wanted something, made a plan, and took action to make it happen. It’s kind of hard to hold her up too high because she is ultimately a silly character in a silly story where almost every character you encounter is an incompetent boob, but she’s not worse than anyone else?

That’s another thing, too! Hit The Road has like, women in it? After replaying Space Quest games it’s kind of dizzying to realise that Sam and Max, with its four women with speaking roles, is a lot better about women than some other games of its era. Because holy hell that’s so depressing. FIVE! And none of them suffer anything randomly terrible – though I suppose Trixie does get kidnapped at one point, which sucks. There’s also a woman in the introduction who is herself not a character, but does exist to show up the awfulness of the self-styled Nice Guy archetype.

Still, in this era of Oh Yeah Women Exist?? it’s amazing to see this game treats them in a way that’s Definitely Not Good Enough, but still is so much better than many of its peers. It has a better plot and better character representation than many games of its generation – and this is a game where you play a talking dog who’s friends with a lagamorph!

Verdict

You can get Sam And Max Hit The Road on GOG, and that’s all for now.

Verdict

Get it if:

You already own it in some other format

You know you like point-and-click games and want a large one

You want a game that’s funny and want to marinate in it

Avoid it if:

You’re looking for a game that’s mature in its problem solving

You’re really not into the use-thing-on-thing school of problem solving

You want all your puzzles to be very key-on-door solutions

[continuity category=8]

Game Pile: Sam & Max Hit The Road Okay, so straight up, Sam and Max Hit The Road is one of my favourite games. It's a point-and-click adventure game with some frustratingly obtuse puzzles.

#Bigfoot Problems #Conroy Bumpus #Lucasarts #Roadside Americana #Sam And Max #Sam And Max Hit The Road #The Death Of Pop Country In The 1990s

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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 5 years ago

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Politics is Show Business for Ugly People…

Digital Elixir Politics is Show Business for Ugly People…

“It’s too late baby Now it’s too late” –Carole King

Politics is show business for ugly people. And you’ve got to play by show business rules.

Show business is all about preparation, getting the act, song, movie, TV show, ready and then marketing it so people will be aware of it and buy it.

And you always want to be first, and you want to eliminate all chance.

You want an upward curve, even if you start low and slow.

You want no lulls. You want to keep people interested, by teasing them with new information on a regular basis.

You want to control the narrative.

And what is the narrative the Democrats are trying to sell?

Damned if I know. The only thing they can agree on is they hate Trump. I hate KISS, but that doesn’t keep them off the road, playing to empty arenas, their fans support them. And speaking of KISS, Gene Simmons is one of the greatest marketers of all time, a complete blowhard, but he’s making it work for himself and the band. Maybe he learned it all from Neil Bogart, who changed his name from “Bogatz,” to give the right “impression.” Bogart failed on his first attempt, trying to sell a record of Johnny Carson routines, it went instantly into the cut-out bin, but then he pivoted to disco and Donna Summer and KISS.

And Bogart was a showman, full of crap. Seemingly everything he said was inflated and wrong. Remember when there were four simultaneous KISS solo albums and Neil said they were instantly gold? The press bought it, even though all of them but Peter Criss’s came back.

You see it’s all about perception. Sell the myth, not the facts.

It’s more important that Elizabeth Warren be seen as a fighter against the man than any specific policy position. People don’t go that deep. CONGRESS doesn’t go that deep! Did you read the “New Yorker” story on Al Franken? His accuser told boldfaced lies, there was history disputing her account, but she got out there first and what she said ruled, even though she was working for a pro-Trump radio station. Once again, the Democrats reacted, and now they’re doubling-down, can’t see why they were wrong. Kirsten Gillibrand, YOU’RE HISTORY!

The press said Trump was losing because he brought up the “i” word before the Democrats. But Trump knows you get ahead of the blowback, you make the first punch, and you load the media with so much b.s. that it can’t keep up.

Meanwhile, the public doesn’t know the difference between impeachment and conviction and Pelosi seems as old as she really is. She’s Perry Como after the Beatles. Doesn’t she realize THE RULES HAVE CHANGED?

Happens in entertainment all the time. Suddenly you can’t sell hair bands. Suddenly hip-hop is burgeoning. And if you fight the tide, you drown. Oh, little fish can still swim in their own private backwaters, but if you’re playing for everything, if you want to run the table, you’ve got to be looking to the future, not the past!

Trump speaks to the public. Pelosi speaks to insiders.

That’s why AOC gets so much traction, she speaks to the public-at-large, it’s less about legislation than attitude, which is move over you old farts and let the younger generation take the reins, you oldsters have no idea what is going on anymore!

But Team Pelosi says you’ve got to run to the center, because you’ve got to appeal to those districts that flipped for Democrats in 2016. That’s like making Aerosmith play acoustic, and refusing to let them play new material.

Of course, Aerosmith doesn’t play new material, and Chris Christie is a big Boss fan. It’s kinda like long hair. Once upon a time it symbolized something, you were either for us or against us, then it was just a fashion choice.

Anyone who plays to the rearguard is always disrupted. Didn’t you ever read Clayton Christensen? Everybody pooh-poohs the new, saying it’s not as good as the old, and then it becomes better and the old folds overnight. Christensen says to embrace the new, and then eliminate the old when the new gains traction. The DNC is being disrupted and their answer? Let’s go back to Good Ol’ Joe. That’s like asking your grandfather for music advice.

So what we’ve got is candidates who want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and the Democrats are freaking out, they can’t even get aligned on one position. Criticize the Republicans all you want, but after Trump they all got in line. That’s how you win, when you play like a team!

And if you try to appeal to everybody, you lose. The road is littered with middle of the road artists, who fail on the chart and play to a dwindling audience in Branson and clubs. You want to get people EXCITED! That’s what Warren and Harris and Bernie and Buttigieg are doing.

And what does the establishment say?

THEY’RE TOO FAR LEFT!

AC/DC was too heavy until suddenly they weren’t. “Back In Black” is still streaming prodigiously today, “You Shook Me All Night Long” is an American anthem! Of course Mutt Lange helped. The right has Karl Rove, who do we have on the left?

So the reason you wanted impeachment is so the whole world would watch, so Trump’s bad behavior, criminal or not, would infect the public. When the truth outs, it’s hard to deny.

But no, it was never time. Pelosi and her pals are like a Silicon Valley outfit that never releases its product. It’s so busy getting it right that it can never come out. Meanwhile, Facebook becomes so big by having a motto of “move fast and break things.” Forget that Zuckerberg is the enemy now, he’s on top of the pyramid, he controls the conversation more than not only Congress, but the mainstream media! Furthermore, he just pivoted, saying it was about private conversations, when the Democrats are still looking for that elusive consensus. Everything worth paying attention to starts off the radar, small, and then it blows up and BECOMES THE MAINSTREAM!

So Barr says Trump is innocent.

The Dems folded their tent.

Then Mueller sends his letter and they think…wow, maybe there’s something here. Like a band the label has stopped working that is suddenly selling tickets…the label is on to something else, it’s hard to get it restarted on your old product.

And then the Democrats placed all their hopes on Mueller testifying. That’s like taking someone with a great record, who’s never been on stage, and having them headline Coachella! No one would do that, the odds of failure are too high.

So Mueller didn’t deliver. Oh, don’t make it about Russia, the Dems thought Mueller was gonna blow a hole through the curtain, reveal that Trump was culpable and should be charged. Not only did Mueller not do this, he said as much after he delivered his report earlier…this was his final statement!

And the Dems are playing by old rules and crying to the nonexistent refs that the Republicans are cheating. No, Trump and his posse have invented new rules, like no one in the regime needs to testify. When they up the ante, so do you! You don’t say there’s no crying in baseball!

So now, on left wing radio, all the talk is about getting the transcripts from the grand jury. God, even in the NFL when you lose, you lose, no matter how heinous the call. Because without rules, you’ve got no game.

And that’s what’s happening now, WE’VE GOT NO GAME! Trump and his cronies are running ragged and the Dems and the media are so flummoxed, they do NOTHING!

Come on. Even the most lame influencer knows you’ve got to deliver product on a regular basis. You’ve got to hook the audience and deliver. That’s certainly what Trump has done, and all the left keeps saying is HE SHOULDN’T TWEET!

Meanwhile, these same wankers are posting to Instagram, the national pastime, and despite their constant disparagement of the internet and Twitter, Twitter is where the news happens, and if you’re not on it, you don’t know what’s going on.

So impeachment failed in the marketplace. It’s like Annapurna, Megan Ellison’s movie company. No matter how great the film, and she’s put out plenty, they never reach expectations. “Booksmart,” one of the best-reviewed movies this year, which appeals to oldsters and youngsters…dead. Product is only one part of the puzzle, you need the aforementioned marketing. The big studios may put out lame films, but they’re experts in marketing them.

When you fail, you write it off. Just look at the Fortune 500, that’s what they do. Did Bezos try to improve the Fire phone? No, he deleted it from the catalog. And today, your mistakes don’t haunt you as long as you continue to play and make noise. Once again, the game has changed, there’s so much noise that the biggest challenge is just reaching the public. And if you don’t, people forget what you were selling, they’re inundated with new messages.

And I’ve used a plethora of metaphors here, but now I’m gonna use one more. Pro football used to be a running game. Now running backs make a fraction of what they used to, all the emphasis is on passing and receiving! You change with the times!

Seems like everybody can change with the times but the Democrats.

So forget impeachment. This is the gang that can’t shoot straight, even if they have clear evidence that Trump needs to go, the right will spin it otherwise and rule the marketplace, i.e. public opinion. And just like a record, you don’t have to appeal to everybody to win. How come Trump knows this and the Democrats don’t?

Instead of clinging to the past, trying to rebuild the old edifice, it’s time to build a new one. And there are a number of candidates promising this. Safe rarely succeeds. Can you say Romney? Can you say Kerry! One of the reasons Obama won was because he HAD little history. There was little to nail him on and he promised hope.

Believe me, Ol’ Joe is not promising hope. He’s like a boomer musician waiting for Hilary Rosen to save them from streaming. But Hilary’s moved on from the RIAA, and streaming has already won, soon there won’t even be any hardware to play discs! Apple kills the iPod because the innards are no longer manufactured, and the Democrats keep trying to prop up oldsters, held together by baling wire. Bill Clinton had Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and her husband selling him, and despite baggage, he won anyway!

Who do the Democrats have?

Maybe it’s time to hire Bill Belichick.

Oh, that’s right, HE’S A TRUMPER!

~~~

Visit the archive: https://ift.tt/IH9kjT – @Lefsetz http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz – If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter

Politics is Show Business for Ugly People…

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gunboatbaylodge · 7 years ago

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Things to Do in Vancouver this Weekend: September 7, 2017

It’s a weekend of the arts as the Vancouver Fringe Festival has begun, bringing performance of all kinds on to Granville Island for 10 days of creative expression you can go watch and even participate in. There’s also an accordion festival, there’s the Facade Festival projecting all over the outside of the Art Gallery, concerts, a Persian calligraphy workshop, and two different sports that can be called “football” depending on where you’re from.

Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Ongoing

Friday September 8

Vancouver Fringe Festival Where: Various locations, Granville Island What: A celebration of theatre for everyone, featuring more than 800 performances by over 90 artists. The Fringe employs an “everyone welcome” selection technique—the mainstage shows are literally drawn out of a hat, giving all artists a chance to participate. There are also unique site-specific theatre where artists stage their work in the nooks and crannies of Granville Island. Runs until: Sunday September 17, 2017

Accordion Noir Festival Where: Various locations What: Celebrating its tenth anniversary as Canada’s only festival of alternative accordion music, this year’s special anniversary edition of Accordion Noir presents a pantheon of international and local accordion talent, including the North American debuts of Finnish accordion shaman Antti Paalanen and all-female Russian ethno-rock quartet Iva Nova, the Canadian debut of Accordion DJ Lykaire from Louisiana, as well as the launch party for Geoff Berner’s latest album, Canadiana Grotesquica. Runs until: Sunday September 10, 2017

Facade Festival Where: Georgia Street façade of the Vancouver Art Gallery What: New and traditional media is used with projection mapping to create ephemeral artworks that respond to Vancouver’s vibrant city center and urban landscape through a plethora of styles and approaches. Artists involved: Diyan Achjadi, Fiona Ackerman, Scott Billings, Annie Briard, Shawn Hunt, James Nizam, Luke Ramsey, Evann Siebens, Ben Skinner, and Paul Wong. Runs until: Sunday September 10, 2017

Angels in America Where: Arts Club Theatre What: Witness the soaring conclusion to the acclaimed play that asks us what we do for those we love. Perestroika is a revolution against the politics and prejudice in the 1980s as the AIDS epidemic rages on, and the characters wrestle with their ideologies and an angel looking for an answer. In the centre of it all is Prior Walter, a man in a world of peril who chooses to live in his light. Runs until: Sunday October 8, 2017

Against Me!

Against Me! Where: The Vogue What: Punk that’s a bit pop with a generous dusting of emo.

BC Lions vs. Montreal Alouettes

BC Lions vs. Montreal Alouettes Where: BC Place Stadium What: It’s a football game, Canadian vs. Canadian – cheer for your fave coast.

Interrupting the Interface | David Wilson Where: Kimoto Gallery What: In building this body of work, Wilson scanned thousands of photographs on Instagram and selected the images he felt compelled to work with. Then it was a matter of copying, pasting, further filtering for his own painting references. Most of the selected images identified with water or fluidity, a pervasive theme throughout Wilson’s work. Runs until: Saturday September 30, 2017

The Getaway Escape Room Where: 4386 Main Street What: A free entertainment experience with a theme focused on escaping the trappings of tedious adulthood tasks, like doing chores, dealing with technology glitches and commuting. Teams of up to eight people have up to 45-minutes to search for clues and solve brain teasing puzzles to help them escape the room. Runs until: Tuesday September 12, 2017

Daniel O’Donnel

Daniel O’Donnell Where: The Orpheum What: According to a press release, this Irish singer made record-breaking chart history earlier this year by becoming the first recording artist in the history of the UK Artist Album Chart to have charted at least one new album every year since 1988, an unprecedented and unbroken 30-year span, surpassing everyone from Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Madonna and U2.

Big Sugar | Image by Michael Maxxis

Big Sugar Where: Commodore Ballroom What: This cocky-rock reggae group that was big in the 90s with Turn the Lights On and Diggin’ a Hole continue to sell out shows across the continent.

Icons Vintage Market Where: 1024 Main Street What: Shop vintage and collectables to the tune of a live DJ and drink specials.

Aileen Bahmanipour: Technical Problem

Aileen Bahmanipour: Technical Problem Where: Grunt Gallery What: An exhibition of mixed media drawings by Vancouver-based, Iranian-born artist Aileen Bahmanipour that explores cyclical political power and cultural identity. Runs until: Saturday October 14, 2017

Seven Beauties: The Films Of Lina Wertmüller

Seven Beauties: The Films Of Lina Wertmüller Where: The Cinematheque What: Known for her bawdy, boisterous satirical forays into the minefields of sex, politics, and social class, Lina Wertmüller (b. 1928 in Rome) was an art-house sensation, and just about the world’s most prominent female director, in the 1970s. Her films, provocative, parodic, and often decidedly un-PC — or, at least, too savage in their irony and iconoclasm to fit easily into simple political boxes — were often highly contentious. Runs until: Monday September 25, 2017

Saturday September 9

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Persian Calligraphy Workshop

Persian Calligraphy Workshop Where: UBC Museum of Anthropology What: Master calligrapher Mojtaba Daneshi from Iran will lead an in-depth workshop on the historical background, materials and methods of Persian calligraphy. Mojtaba will demonstrate the traditional and experimental techniques he has developed over the years, including carving wet paint on canvas. Participants will complete a unique work on canvas to take home.

Vancouver Whitecaps vs. Real Salt Lake

Vancouver Whitecaps vs. Real Salt Lake Where: BC Place Stadium What:Watch and cheer for some soccer.

Fall For Local

Fall for Local Where: The Pipe Shop Building (Vancouver’s North Shore) What: A market by a community for established and emerging entrepreneurs interested in gaining brand exposure, sharing knowledge and collaborating with other creative entrepreneurs to promote the “circle economy” philosophy. Runs until: Sunday September 10, 2017

Slumber Here

Slumber Here Where: Granville Island What:A fully immersive, multi-sensory experience, in which audience members explore a dreamlike fairy world where they find themselves seduced by Oberon, assist the Mechanicals to fix their play, help Puck create mischief, and even interact with a real, live mini donkey. Inspired by Shakespeare’s most popular comedy, it offers an interactive narrative for audience members to explore, often by themselves, in order to discover hidden scenes, encounter performers one-on-one, imbibe custom-designed fairy elixirs and treats, and potentially change the outcome of the play. Runs until: Sunday September 17, 2017

GoGo Penguin

GoGo Penguin (show 1 of 2) Where: Frankie’s Jazz Club What: Hailing from Manchester in the UK, jazz meets electronica with influences from Brian Eno, John Cage, Massive Attack, and Aphex Twin.

The Quiz Show Returns

The Quiz Show Returns Where: The Fox Cabaret What: A spoof on segments from game shows past with all-original segments featuring local comedians as contestants doing their best to make audience members laugh – and win prizes, of course.

Benjamin Booker

Benjamin Booker Where: The Biltmore What: New Orleans-based guitarist, singer-songwriter and guitarist on tour to support his latest release “Witness”.

Performance: Object Without Shadow

Performance: Object Without Shadow Where: TBC What: Sikarnt Skoolisariyaporn re-enacts a ritual she practiced with her father’s Chinese-born family each September, the period when it is believed that ghosts are able to make a momentary reappearance from the afterlife. In this custom, paper replicas of desirable objects – such as jewelry, iPhones, computers and majong sets – are burned as offerings to ancestors.

Perturbator + Author and Punisher

Perturbator + Author and Punisher Where: The Rickshaw What: Dark synth wiz from Paris + a one-man industrial doom and drone metal machine from San Diego.

Luxury and Supercar Weekend Where: VanDusen Gardens What: Canada’s premier luxury lifestyle and automotive event celebrates its eighth year with latest Supercar designs, classic Concours collectibles, fall fashion, watches, jewelry, specialty foods, wines and premium spirits. Runs until: Sunday September 10, 2017

Sunday September 10

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Pop Up Roller Disco

Pop Up Roller Disco Where: Robson Square Skating Rink What: Classic roller rink vibes with big hair, short shorts, long socks, and all of the disco, funk, R&B and glam rock you can handle, brought to you by DJ K-Tel. Limited quad and in-line skate rentals will be available (first come, first served).

Thundercat

Thundercat Where: The Commodore Ballroom What: An American multi-genre bass guitarist, producer and singer from LA.

GoGo Penguin (show 2 of 2) Where: Frankie’s Jazz Club What: Hailing from Manchester in the UK, jazz meets electronica with influences from Brian Eno, John Cage, Massive Attack, and Aphex Twin.

Ongoing

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Accordion Noir Festival Where: Various lacations What: Celebrating its tenth anniversary as Canada’s only festival of alternative accordion music, this year’s special anniversary edition of Accordion Noir presents a pantheon of international and local accordion talent, including the North American debuts of Finnish accordion shaman Antti Paalanen and all-female Russian ethno-rock quartet Iva Nova, the Canadian debut of Accordion DJ Lykaire from Louisiana, as well as the launch party for Geoff Berner’s latest album, Canadiana Grotesquica. Runs until: Sunday September 10, 2017

Neither Wolf Nor Dog

Neither Wolf Nor Dog Where: VanCity Theatre What: Adapted from the acclaimed novel by Kent Nerburn, this funny and deeply moving film follows an author who gets sucked into the heart of contemporary Native American life in the sparse lands of the Dakotas by a 95-year-old Lakota elder. Runs until: Sunday September 10, 2017

The Teacher

The Teacher Where: VanCity Theatre What: Set in Bratislava during the final decade of Communism, it examines the abuse of power at a middle school. Zuzana Mauréry tears into the part of a lifetime as a terrifyingly passive-aggressive teacher, Mrs. Drazdechova, who happens to be a bigwig in the local Communist party. She shamelessly exploits pupils and parents alike in return for dispensing generous grades. Runs until: Sunday September 10, 2017

Panda International Night Market Where: Richmond, BC What: A diverse market in Richmond, with shopping, food, beverages, and a game zone. Runs until: Monday September 11, 2017

Aileen Bahmanipour: Technical Problem

Flora and Fauna: A Summer Art Show Where: The Fall Tattooing and Artist Studio What: An artistic summer celebration of all vibrant, colourful, living things. Runs until: Friday September 15, 2017

Oh, Canada – The True North Strong and Funny

Oh, Canada – The True North Strong and Funny Where: The Improv Centre on Granville Island What: Based on audience suggestions, the cast lampoon such Canadian ‘institutions’ as Heritage Minutes, the Mounties, winter, our hunky Prime Minister, hockey, and lumberjacks or other endless possibilities. As this is improv and the show is made up on the spot, no two shows are ever the same. Join us for some distinctively Canadian laughs. You’ll be nicer for it. Runs until: Saturday September 16, 2017

Slumber Here

Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival

Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival Where: Vanier Park What: What do you say to watching a live production of Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter’s Tale, The Merchant of Venice or The Two Gentlemen of Verona in a custom-built tent on the beach while sipping wine, beer, and munching on a picnic lunch themed to the play? Yes! Right? After 28 years, this festival has hit a stride of near perfection (and don’t even get us started on the amazing costumes.) Runs until: Saturday September 23, 2017

Jaad Kuujus: Meghann O’Brien

Jaad Kuujus: Meghann O’Brien Where: Bill Reid Gallery What: Meghann takes materials from the natural world and transforms them into pieces of high-level human expression. Working with traditional materials such as mountain goat wool and cedar bark has given her a deep connection to the supernatural world, a connection to her ancestors. She describes working with cedar bark as, “travelling back in time” or “touching the cosmos”. Her creations have a profound impact within contemporary Northwest Coast art and beyond. Runs until: September 2017

A Sublime Vernacular: The Landscape Paintings of Levine Flexhaug

A Sublime Vernacular: The Landscape Paintings of Levine Flexhaug Where: Contemporary Art Gallery What: The first overview of the extraordinary career of Levine Flexhaug (1918 – 1974), born in the Treelon area near Climax, Saskatchewan. It brings together approximately 450 of the artist’s paintings as well as several of his mural-sized works. An itinerant painter, he sold thousands of variations of essentially the same landscape painting in national parks, resorts, department stores and bars across western Canada from the late 1930s through the early 1960s. Runs until: Sunday September 24, 2017

Unbelievable

Unbelievable Where: The Museum of Vancouver What: This exhibition poses provocative questions about our perception of stories by assembling iconic artifacts, storied replicas, and contested objects for a mind-bending exploration of the role stories play in defining lives and communities – and what happens when we question the tales we’ve long relied upon. Unbelievable objects include the Thunderbird totem pole that appeared in controversial filmmaker Edward Curtis’ 1906 work In the Land of the Head Hunters; contemporary ‘totems’, each with contrasting stories about a point in time in Vancouver; and artifacts illustrating the complex narrative around Vancouver’s relationship with First Nations communities. Runs until: Sunday September 24, 2017

Uninterrupted

Uninterrupted Where: Under the Cambie Street Bridge What: After dusk, audiences will witness the extraordinary migration of wild Pacific salmon in a 30-minute cinematic spectacle that explores the connection between nature and our urban environments. Runs until: Sunday September 24, 2017

Be Polite

Be Polite Where: Contemporary Art Gallery What: Working closely with the Estate of Gordon Bennett and IMA Brisbane the exhibition will comprise a selection of rare works on paper including drawing, painting, watercolour, poetry, and essays from the early 1990s through to the early 2000s. Runs until: Sunday September 24, 2017

Sunday Art Market

Sunday Art Market Where: Jim Deva Plaza What: Local artists, vendors and makers, largely from Vancouver’s West End, along with musical and other live performances and artist-led workshops to drop into. Runs until: Sunday September 24, 2017

Seven Beauties: The Films Of Lina Wertmüller

Works by Anna Milton

Works by Anna Milton Where: VanDusen Gardens What: Anna has been exhibiting and selling her work internationally since her college years. She trained and worked as an art therapist for many years and is interested in symbols and metaphor that are present in visual art. Runs until: Wednesday September 27, 2017

Shipyards Night Marlet

Shipyards Night Market Where: Lonsdale, North Vancouver What: Food, art, music, entertainment, shopping, a beer garden, and you can bring your dog! Runs until: September 29, 2017

ZimCarvings Where: VanDusen Botanical Garden What: Patrick Sephani along with visiting artist Peter Kananji will be showcasing works from over 30 Zimbabwean stone sculptors on the beautiful garden grounds and carving stone sculptures on site. All works will be available for purchase. Runs until: Saturday September 30, 2017

Downtown Eastside Women’s Summer Fair Where: Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre What: Over twenty-five vendors and artisans from within the community, entertainment from local performers, an area for children to play, information booths about the different resources available in the community, and a wide variety of goods and services for purchase. Runs until: Saturday September 30, 2017 (Saturdays)

Claude Monet’s Secret Garden

Claude Monet’s Secret Garden Where: Vancouver Art Gallery What: The most comprehensive exhibition of French painter Claude Monet’s work in Canada in two decades, Claude Monet’s Secret Garden will trace the career of this pivotal figure in Western art history. This exhibition will present thirty-eight paintings spanning the course of Monet’s long career from the unparalleled collection of the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Runs until: Sunday October 1, 2017

Stephen Shore: The Giverny Portfolio

Stephen Shore: The Giverny Portfolio Where: Vancouver Art Gallery What: Twenty-five photographs by contemporary American photographer Stephen Shore produced during several visits to Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s famous gardens at Giverny, France. Showing concurrently with the exhibition Claude Monet’s Secret Garden, Stephen Shore: The Giverny Portfolio offers a contemporary perspective on the tranquility originally captured in Monet’s iconic paintings. Runs until: Sunday October 1, 2017

Persistence

Persistence Where: Vancouver Art Gallery What: Persistence draws together three recent contemporary installations to explore the surprising and creative ways that technologies, physical objects and natural processes endure and transform. Runs until: October 1, 2017

Elad Lassry

Elad Lassry Where: Vancouver Art Gallery What: Investigating the nature of perception with a special focus on the photographic image within the digital era, the exhibition includes more than seventy works—films, photographs and sculpture—produced by Lassry over the last decade. Runs until: Sunday October 1, 2017

Mount Pleasant Farmers Market Where: Dude Chilling Park What: Amble over and pick up some afternoon picnic supplies, groceries for the week, and Sunday dinner fixings from 25+ farms and producers. Each week you’ll find a fresh selection of just-picked seasonal fruits & veggies, ethically-raised meats & sustainable seafood, artisanal bread & prepared foods, craft beer, wine, & spirits, handmade craft, and coffee & food trucks. Runs until: Sunday October 8, 2017

Traces of Words: Art and Calligraphy from Asia

Traces of Words: Art and Calligraphy from Asia Where: UBC Museum of Anthropology What: Words and their physical manifestations are explored in this insightful exhibition, which will honour the special significance that written forms. Varied forms of expression associated with writing throughout Asia is shown over the span of different time periods: from Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions, Qu’ranic manuscripts, Southeast Asian palm leaf manuscripts and Chinese calligraphy from MOA’s Asian collection to graffiti art from Afghanistan and contemporary artworks using Japanese calligraphy, and Tibetan and Thai scripts. Runs until: Monday October 9, 2017

Richmond Night Market

Richmond Night Market Where: Richmond, BC What: There’s a dinosaur park! Anamatronic dinosaurs! Also – live performances, carnival games, over 200 retail stalls and over 500 food choices from around the world. Runs until: October 9, 2017

Onsite / Offsite Tsang Kin-Wah

Onsite / Offsite Tsang Kin-Wah Where: Vancouver Art Gallery What: This large-scale composition transforms English texts to form intricate floral and animal patterns. The work draws from discriminatory language that appeared in newspapers and political campaigns in Vancouver during the 1887 anti-Chinese riots, the mid-1980s immigration influx from Hong Kong and most recently, the heated exchanges around the foreign buyers and the local housing market. Runs until: Sunday October 15, 2017

West End Farmers Market Where: 1100 Comox St What: Located in the heart of Vancouver’s busy West End, this laid-back Saturday market looks onto beautiful Nelson Park and adjacent community gardens. Each week, shop for the best in local, seasonal produce, artisanal bread & prepared foods, craft beer, wine, & spirits, ethically raised meat, eggs, & dairy, sustainable seafood, wild crafted product, and handmade craft. Hot food & coffee on-site as well. Runs until: Saturday October 21, 2017 (Saturdays)

Trout Lake Farmers Market Where: Trout Lake What: This is where you’ll find the vendors who have been doing it since the beginning; what started as 14 farmers ‘squatting’ at the Croatian Cultural Centre back in 1995 has grown into Vancouver’s most well-known and beloved market. Visitors come from near and far to sample artisan breads & preserves, stock up on free-range and organic eggs & meats, get the freshest, hard-to-find heirloom vegetables and taste the first Okanagan cherries and peaches of the season. Runs until: Saturday October 21, 2017 (Saturdays)

Kitsilano Farmers Market

Kitsilano Farmers Market Where: Kitsilano Community Centre parking lot What: A great selection of just-picked, seasonal fruits & vegetables, ethically raised and grass fed meat, eggs, & dairy, sustainable seafood, fresh baked bread & artisanal food, local beer, wine, & spirits, and beautiful, handmade craft. Kids and parents alike can enjoy entertainment by market musicians, a nearby playground and splash park, and coffee and food truck offerings each week. Runs until: Sunday October 22, 2017 (Sundays)

The Lost Fleet Exhibit Where: Vancouver Maritime Museum What: On December 7, 1941 the world was shocked when Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, launching the United States into the war. This action also resulted in the confiscation of nearly 1,200 Japanese-Canadian owned fishing boats by Canadian officials on the British Columbia coast, which were eventually sold off to canneries and other non-Japanese fishermen. The Lost Fleet looks at the world of the Japanese-Canadian fishermen in BC and how deep-seated racism played a major role in the seizure, and sale, of Japanese-Canadian property and the internment of an entire people. Runs until: Winter 2017

Bill Reid Creative Journeys | Image via the Canadian Museum of History

Bill Reid Creative Journeys Where: The Bill Reid Gallery What: Celebrating the many creative journeys of acclaimed master goldsmith and sculptor Bill Reid (1920–1998), this exhibition provides a comprehensive introduction to his life and work. Runs until: Sunday December 10, 2017

Amazonia: The Rights of Nature

Amazonia: The Rights of Nature Where: UBC Museum of Anthropology What: MOA will showcase its Amazonian collections in a significant exploration of socially and environmentally-conscious notions intrinsic to indigenous South American cultures, which have recently become innovations in International Law. These are foundational to the notions of Rights of Nature, and they have been consolidating in the nine countries that share responsibilities over the Amazonian basin. Runs until: January 28, 2018

Emily Carr: Into the Forest

Emily Carr: Into the Forest Where: Vancouver Art Gallery What: Far from feeling that the forests of the West Coast were a difficult subject matter, Carr exulted in the symphonies of greens and browns found in the natural world. With oil on paper as her primary medium, Carr was free to work outdoors in close proximity to the landscape. She went into the forest to paint and saw nature in ways unlike her fellow British Columbians, who perceived it as either untamed wilderness or a plentiful source of lumber. Runs until: March 4, 2018

Chief Dan George: Actor and Activist Where: North Vancouver Museum What: An exhibition exploring the life and legacy of Tsleil-Waututh Chief Dan George (1899- 1981) and his influence as an Indigenous rights advocate and his career as an actor. The exhibition was developed in close collaboration with the George family. Runs until: April 2018

In a Different Light

In a Different Light Where: Museum of Anthropology What: More than 110 historical Indigenous artworks and marks the return of many important works to British Columbia. These objects are amazing artistic achievements. Yet they also transcend the idea of ‘art’ or ‘artifact’. Through the voices of contemporary First Nations artists and community members, this exhibition reflects on the roles historical artworks have today. Featuring immersive storytelling and innovative design, it explores what we can learn from these works and how they relate to Indigenous peoples’ relationships to their lands. Runs until: Spring 2019

What are you up to this weekend? Tell me and the rest of Vancouver in the comments below or tweet me directly at @lextacular

Inside Vancouver Blog

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playeroneplayertwo · 5 years ago

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Editorial: ‘Til the Money Runs Out

(Unless otherwise clarified, all prices are MSRP, or manufacture standard retail price)

The subjectivity evident in any critical analysis of a book, movie, or board game is–I would hope–obvious. Value, however, feels far less subjective.

How much someone is willing to pay for something varies greatly depending on the person, not only based on what we’re talking about, but also how much money that person has. With that out of the way, let’s talk about a sticky wicket in the hobby of board gaming: value.

It wasn’t long ago that this idea felt less nebulous, with value often coming down to the argument of collectable games vs non-collectable games. Things are a little different now. Collectable card games (CCGs), expandable games/living card games (LCGs), legacy games, campaign games, mystery games, and consumable games have gone a long way in complicating a once-simple(ish?) idea. These days, everyone has an idea of what’s a good value, and what’s not. Lots of people have axes to grind against games deemed “of poor value.” I’ll try not to fall into such a black and white box.

When I originally thought about writing about value, my main angle was simple: Magic (1993) vs an LCG, like Android: Netrunner (2012) or Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (2011). As a former fan of Magic transformed into an avid LCG fan, I bristled at the less than rosy coverage most LCGs received from the gaming community, in regards to value specifically. I knew firsthand how expensive a collectable game like Magic could cost. With a 15-card Magic booster pack costing $3.99, and a booster box of 36 booster packs coming in usually around $100, it gets expensive quickly. Individual cards can be bought online for anywhere from 10¢ to $50+, this is a deep hole that is hungry and ready to eat you alive.

For anyone who has not played a collectable game, it is set apart from LCGs by randomness. A collectable game is purchased in packs of randomized cards, so oftentimes you will purchase a pack and get nothing you want or need. This happens far more than you would believe. LCGs/expandable card games are unique because they are available in fixed, non-randomized sets, whether that be small expansion packs of larger deluxe expansions. The rub is that these will cost more. For example, the typical small expansion pack for an LCG is typically $14.99, but you know exactly what you receive in that expansion, and additionally you’ll receive multiple copies of each card–something that never happens in collectable packs.

This distinction alone is worth a deeper dive, but we’ll only gloss over it briefly. Head to head LCGs or expandable games (like the now OP Android: Netrunner, Legend of the Five Rings (2017), Doomtown: Reloaded (2014), or Game of Thrones: The Card Game (2015)) offer a large pool of cards with a fixed distribution. You would conceivably be able to buy the core set for one of these ($40), plus perhaps four small expansions ($60 total), which puts you in at $100. For $100, you could buy a booster box of Magic cards and maybe build two strong decks, if you’re looking to have a satisfying experience. The randomness will throw a wrench in here, because you could theoretically get enough good cards for more than two solid decks; you could also get mostly junk.

Reviewers often balk at the LCG model, because while it appears to solve the money-pit aspect of CCGs, they are still not cheap. That being said, for people who are merely interested in the game–but not deck construction, LCG core sets offer plenty of introductory level gaming to help you discern whether you actually like a game or not. If you do, and you know what you like about the game (eg factions or mechanics), the set expansion packs allow you to build up where you want. Why buy an expansion pack for a faction you don’t like or don’t play? You don’t have to!

The cooperative LCGs are a different story. They, too, have the $15 expansion packs, but in addition to cards you’ll add to your pool for deck construction, you’ll also get quests to play against, essentially a typical “expansion” that brings in additional content beyond merely deck construction.

Whether it be cooperative or head-to-head, LCGs are expensive, but unlike CCGs, LCGs have simultaneously removed both the excitement of the blind buy as well as the frustration of the bad buy. Granted, in the small box expansions, you’ll still be getting cards you don’t need or don’t want, but at the very least, you will be getting at least a few cards you know you want (if not, uh... why did you buy it? Do your homework!).

As a player of both Lord of the Rings: The Card Game and Arkham Horror: The Card Game (2016), I would argue that the best value for me in LCGs probably lies in the cooperative line. By giving players both quests to pursue as well as player cards tailored to those specific quests, these small packs never feel incomplete. And, I would argue, getting a core box of Arkham Horror or Lord of the Rings is a great value as an introduction to satisfying, well-supported systems.

Beyond card games, the water actually gets far muddier when you expand what you’re talking about. Legacy games and escape room games (which is a term I’ll use to encompass both consumable games and “mystery” games that, once solved, can’t really be replayed satisfactorily) have managed to blur the lines in terms of value considerably. Let’s start with legacy games.

A legacy game is a game that evolves the more you play it, and with the exception of Charterstone (2017), most legacy games cannot be played beyond the completion of their main narrative arch. For example, Pandemic Legacy (season one or two) leads the players through a series of games that add up to a long-form narrative. As the games unfold, the rules of Pandemic will change, as will the cards, board, and other components, making the last game wholly unique from the first. However, once completed, you can’t play it again. You may as well recycle your game. Charterstone, Stonemaier Games’ take on the legacy game, at least leaves you with what amounts to a custom-designed worker placement game that is replayable. Legacy games can be played anywhere from 10-20 times before you complete the story. That being said, because they have so many components, they are usually quite expensive: Pandemic Legacy (2015/2017), $70; Charterstone (2017), $70; Betrayal Legacy (2018), $75; Rise of Queensdale (2018), $80; and the peril-plagued SeaFall (2016), $80.

After looking at these numbers, take a minute and compare them to the LCG/CCG numbers above. Yes, they are cheaper, but they also have a limited lifespan. Is a legacy game worth $70-$80 if you can only play it 12 times? That’s about $7 per play, cheaper than (or at least comparable to) a movie ticket for a good night spent gaming. Seems like a decent deal, right?

What about consumable or “mystery” games? In this case, I’m looking at you Exit (2016), Unlock (2017), and T.I.M.E. Stories (2015). Other games will fall into this category too (further escape room games or a host of Sherlock Holmes or similar mystery-type games, like Consulting Detective (1981) or Chronicles of Crime (2018)), but these three games are hyper present in the hobby today. Both Exit and Unlock retail for $15, but they will each offer a one-time experience only. Unlock games are mystery-based, so once you’ve worked your way through, they essentially can’t be replayed because the answers will all be known. As for Exit, this is probably one of the more controversial because it is literally consumable. At the end of a game of Exit, that $15 game you bought is now destroyed. Cards are cut, the book is written on or torn up, maybe event the box is destroyed. Unlike Unlock, you can’t even trade it to someone who has not yet played it. Each set of Unlock and Exit is unique, offering lots of new games, but it’s a flat $15 each time you play. Still cheaper than a night at the movies.

Which brings us to T.I.M.E. Stories (2015). T.I.M.E Stories is essentially a board game version of Unlock: card-based and entrenched in a branching narrative with puzzles. You’ll play one set of T.I.M.E. Stories maybe three times, at most, before it’s completed and cannot be replayed. The core box ($50) sets you up with the components and one mystery. Additional mysteries are available in modular expansions for $25 each. At its heart, T.I.M.E. Stories is most analogous to a BluRay player, with each expansion being a new BluRay you pop in to watch. In the long run, it’s also the most expensive of the bunch.

So what’s the point of all this? Board games are expensive, but you know that. Your average big box board game (ie not a traditionally labeled “filler game”) runs anywhere from $30-$60 MSRP.

Ah, but who pays MSRP these days? you’ve been muttering this whole time.

Who’s paying MSRP? Well, if you’re looking to support your brick and mortar local game stores, you should be. Yes, this is a tough case to make, because money is money. It’s hard to rationalize spending $90 on Scythe (2016) to support your local store when you can buy it online for $52. I can try to make my best possible case for spending that extra $40, but like I said, it’s a tough sell. $40 is a whole other game. I’d like to say I only shop local, but it’s simply not true. This hobby is expensive, and while I buy local when I can, more often than not I buy online from brick and mortar places like Cool Stuff Inc or Miniature Market. It’s worth making a case for buying local, though. Do you like having a local store? If you want to keep having a local store, shop there. Support them. Give them your money when you can. It’s hard out there for brick and mortar stores. And please, don’t expect a brick and mortar store to sell at online prices. I don’t want to have to explain profit margins; in almost all cases it’s just not feasible.

In the long run, what does this all mean? I could throw my opinions at you endlessly about how I think T.I.M.E. Stories is, for Player Two and I, not worth it, or about how Exit is worth it, or legacy games don’t work for us, but that’s not what I’m here for ultimately. I guess I’d like people to ease up on LCGs, and maybe think twice about those hot hot big box legacy games, or remember to pass on their Unlock games to friends or families to get extra miles out of those small boxes. The breadth of the hobby is wide, and it is getting wider every year. Ultimately, you need to decide what you’re willing to invest, and in this case I don’t just mean you money, but also your time. Which of these games will you get your time value out of? If you buy a legacy game with shoddy mechanics, it will fail you on value across the board, because you won’t even finish it. LCGs or CCGs will offer you–theoretically–endless play, but if you don’t like the game enough, or it’s not nuanced enough to sustain those theoretical infinite plays, what’s the point?

The best advice I can give new gamers is to start small. Do your homework on small box games first. There’s a reason that in our first episode recommended gateway game was Oh My Goods! (2015). It’s a quality game that teaches new players a lot about engine building euros, it’s got decent replayability, it’s got two expansions, and it’s only $15. If you are new to the hobby, figure out what you like. Don’t run out and buy Lords of Hellas (2018), Batman: Gotham City Chronicles (2019), or Gloomhaven (2017) on a lark, because you’ll be unloading tons of money on something you may loath.

There’s nothing wrong with starting small. Trust me, in the long run, it will save you a lot of time and money.

#board games #value #editorial #my two cents

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postgamecontent · 7 years ago

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The Legend of Oasis: SEGA Saturn Spotlight #2

Original Release Date: April 26, 1996

Original Hardware: SEGA Saturn

Developer/Publisher: Ancient/SEGA

During SEGA's tenure as a console manufacturer, they often found themselves trying to counter-program the biggest hits on rival consoles, often to mixed results. For every Streets of Rage and Sonic the Hedgehog, there was an Eternal Champions and Kid Chameleon. Not that those games were without merit, but they weren't up to the task of convincing people they didn't need Street Fighter 2 and Super Mario World. One game SEGA was constantly trying to find an answer for was The Legend of Zelda. It makes sense, as it has always been one of Nintendo's top brands, a real system-seller any hardware company would dream of having in their line-up. SEGA developed and/or published a bunch of great action-RPGs and action-adventure games, but none of them fared well enough in the market to fit SEGA's needs.

The most successful of the lot was probably Beyond Oasis, a 1994 SEGA Genesis title developed by Ancient. It's a gorgeous top-down action-adventure game with a nice mix of surprisingly deep combat and interesting puzzles. Its Arabian Nights feel capitalized nicely on the wave of popularity for such settings in the wake of Disney's Aladdin, while also helping it feel distinct from the countless games in the genre that adopted more generic Western fantasy stylings. Unlike most of SEGA's other efforts in this respect, Beyond Oasis didn't look like it was desperately chasing Zelda. It had its own style and flair, something I'm sure the audience picked up on.

As usual, let's give a brief overview of the game's developer. Ancient was founded in 1990 by Tomo Koshiro, the mother of famed video game composer Yuzo Koshiro. After working with SEGA on the soundtrack for Revenge of Shinobi, Yuzo Koshiro pitched the idea of developing games to SEGA. The company had big ambitions for their upcoming Genesis game Sonic the Hedgehog, and wanted a version of the game for their other active hardware platforms, the Master System and Game Gear. Either SEGA was thin on choices or Koshiro's charm convinced them, as they ended up assigning the job of developing the 8-bit Sonic to a 22-year-old musician. Yuzo Koshiro needed a company to make a contract with SEGA, however, and thus Ancient was born. Mainly a family affair, Ancient not only counts Yuzo Koshiro's mother among its tiny staff, but also his sister, Ayano.

Ancient's name pops up frequently in game credits, but mostly due to Yuzo's work as a composer. Still, they've managed to put out a number of games over the years. Besides the subject of this article and its predecessor, Ancient also worked on games like Streets of Rage 2, Robotrek, Car Battler Joe, and the superb Gotta Protectors. Ancient's small size has helped it survive some very hostile periods in the gaming business and should ensure that we will be seeing their name appear in games for a long time to come. To be honest, I find most of Ancient's games to be a little bland. They're never bad, mind you, but aside from the music, they seem to be missing a certain spark. Nevertheless, they developed one of the greatest beat-em-ups in gaming history, so I'm willing to forgive many of Ancient's shortcomings.

Before I go any further, I'm going to dedicate a paragraph to names. I'm using the American titles for both of these games, but they went by different names in each major region. In Japan, the first game was The Story of Thor: Heir of the Light. In Europe, they went for a straight translation and called it The Story of Thor: A Successor of The Light. I'm not sure why SEGA of America felt the need to rename it Beyond Oasis, but it might have been to avoid confusion with Marvel's version of Thor. At the time he was barely known outside of America, and even in America, best-known for being the superhero the kid from Adventures in Babysitting was imitating. Still, better safe than sorry. Anyway, the second game's title in Japan was Thor: The Legend of the Spirit King. In Europe, it was The Story of Thor 2. In America, SEGA kept the Oasis connection going with the title The Legend of Oasis. And now we're all confused!

After the success of Beyond Oasis, Ancient decided to follow it up for their next project. In the early stages, the game's title was Legend of Thor, and it was planned to release on SEGA's ill-fated 32X add-on for the Genesis. I can't even begin to imagine why. Fortunately, they soon scrapped that idea and got to work on making something for the SEGA Saturn instead. The Saturn was something of a 2D powerhouse, which meant that as good as Beyond Oasis had looked, the follow-up would really be able to turn some heads. Or at least, it might have if the majority of the active gaming population at the time hadn't gone ga-ga for polygons. Timing is everything, I suppose.

In any case, the development of The Legend of Oasis was relatively painless compared to some other Saturn projects, and the game shipped more-or-less on schedule in early 1996 in Japan and late 1996 in the rest of the world. Sadly, like most Saturn games, The Legend of Oasis didn't sell very well worldwide. With much of the success of Beyond Oasis coming from outside of Japan, the Saturn's weak status overseas did no favors to games like this one. Oasis was really swimming against the current, too. As I've mentioned, 2D games were not seen in a very good light during the 32-bit generation of consoles, which is funny because they've certainly aged better than the blocky polygonal graphics of most of that era's 3D games.

Looking past the visuals, it's perhaps less surprising that The Legend of Oasis didn't hit as big as its predecessor. On a fundamental level, it's just too similar to the first game. The majority of the powers you earn are the same and tend to be applied in similar ways. There's one new weapon, but it's not a very exciting one. Playing the game feels like you're going through the same motions from Beyond Oasis, but without any of the shiny novelty that helped that game stand out. It's not bad, and it's just loose enough with its physics and level designs that you can cobble together some really interesting solutions to problems. But there is a genuine been-there, done-that feeling to the game that never quite goes away.

A prequel to the first game, it has the main character doing basically the same things that the character in the original did. This time around, our hero is given the Gold Armlet rather than just finding it, but you'll need to go around and collect each of the spirits one-by-one just the same. Each spirit has an assortment of abilities you can use to solve puzzles or to help in more general situations. While there are some new abilities and applications for the returning spirits, you'll find yourself using them in familiar ways. The Zelda games have shown that returning items can work, but you really have to be clever about making the puzzles feel unique and interesting if you take that route. The Legend of Oasis also adds a couple of totally new spirits, but they're mainly used to solve specific puzzles. They're weird-looking keys, in other words.

The steady balance between action and puzzles has been disturbed somewhat, too. The Legend of Oasis tilts more in the direction of the puzzle-solving and platforming at the expense of combat. For all of the moves that hero Leon has at his disposal, you can get through most battles with his basic jump kick. It even works well on many of the bosses. The command-based, Street Fighter-style special moves make a return, but they're not all that useful beyond using them to knock down specific obstacles and such.

Like the first game, The Legend of Oasis is pretty easy once you know how to solve the puzzles, and even those aren't too tough. I'm of two minds when it comes to the platforming. While it's not as rough as Dark Savior, the camera perspective makes some of the jumps a real pain. Worse still, if you fall down, you usually land in another location. You then need to make your way back to wherever you were, which is a tremendous waste of time for misjudging the depth of a platform. On the other hand, I like that you can cheat a lot of the platforming with your various moves and the objects in the environment. It's very organic, especially for a game of this era.

Another balance disturbed is that between the dungeons and the overworld. You spend very little time outside of dungeons in The Legend of Oasis, and there's not a lot to discover in those rare moments. I can't put my finger on why, exactly, but it makes the game feel more artificial and claustrophobic compared to its Genesis fore bearer. Some changes are for the better, however. In Beyond Oasis, every weapon you could get had a limited number of uses before it would break. Weapon-breaking systems are always controversial, and it's an especially big gamble if the game isn't transparent about how close the item in question is to being broken. You don't have to worry about that in this game, as your weapons will survive any number of uses. It could be argued that The Legend of Oasis doesn't need anything to make it easier than it already is, but there are right ways and wrong ways of adding challenge to a game. Kudos to Ancient for realizing that their previous weapon system was one of the wrong ones.

Storywise, the game is fine. Nothing great, and Leon is as blank a slate as you're ever going to see in a game. But it does have some twists and turns, and being a prequel, there are certain things it needs to explain to set up the state that the world is in during the events of Beyond Oasis. It handles those aspects fairly well, even if you'll probably see them coming from a mile away. So yes, it's alright. Unlike Dark Savior, the narrative here isn't good enough to excuse the game's flaws, but then again, it has fewer of those to wallpaper over. Rather than being a complex beast of mixed qualities, The Legend of Oasis is just flat, solid, and largely unexciting. It rarely embarrasses itself, but in pursuit of that inoffensiveness, it never really tries for anything interesting, either.

If there's one place where it does rise above expectations, it's in the presentation. The art and character design by Ayano Koshiro is excellent, and the game does a fantastic job of presenting her work. Things sometimes get a little pixelated when scaling occurs, but that's reasonable, I think. Yuzo Koshiro's soundtrack is quite unusual, however. His music often steals the show in games, but here it's almost understated. The soundtrack is frequently quiet, even going to silence at times. The classic Kojiro riffs are nowhere to be found. Yet it's oddly compelling, this mysterious soundtrack that sounds very little like Koshiro's other work.

I guess what it comes down to is this: the Oasis series was too young to be coasting along like this game does. Had the brand been well-established, no one would blink an eye at a lore-expanding retread like The Legend of Oasis, but Ancient really needed to do something more exciting to properly take advantage of the momentum built by the first game. The Legend of Oasis is a decent enough game, and if you like action-RPGs or Zelda-style games, I'd certainly encourage you to give it a go. But I think even if the Saturn were in a better place, even if 2D graphics weren't at their lowest period in terms of public perception, The Legend of Oasis probably wouldn't have made much of a splash. It's just too safe. That's not something you can say about a lot of Saturn RPGs, but here we are.

The Oasis series would never be seen again after this, though Beyond Oasis has enjoyed a healthy retirement via re-releases on various Genesis collections and through Nintendo's Virtual Console service. Unfortunately, The Legend of Oasis seems relegated to the bins of history, like almost every Saturn exclusive. Maybe one day SEGA will give the system some love in their frequent trips to the retro re-release well, and if they do, I could see The Legend of Oasis being a welcome part of that.

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