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syzygyzip · 5 years ago

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Rendering of the Gamer’s Body

This essay examines how we collectively neglect the true subject of gaming, and what this neglect means for our conception of the medium’s artistic potential and psychological effects. It is informed by the following concepts, elaborated in other essays: game-entrainment postures of attention

There is an incredible poverty of language for analyzing video games. We can talk about some details: the specs, the mechanics, the assets, the sequence. However, we can barely begin to discuss theme or genre in any meaningful way. The genres that we do have named—FPS, moba, bullet hell, RPG—provide some utility through familiarity and association, but even by compounding them it is very difficult to convey the sense of what a game is like. This is, of course, because video games are primarily haptic and somatic experiences, a phenomenological field even more intimately subjective than the ethic/aesthetic responses that are typically the primary concern of conventional media.

It bears repeating: the actual subject of gaming is somatic experience. More than the graphics, animation, mechanics, gameplay, or gamefeel, it is rather the idiosyncratic distribution of attention among these elements that determine what a game is, what is the animal with whom you are negotiating. Or rather, it is the accumulation of those distributions that constitutes this animal, since the shape of one’s attention is continually morphing throughout the game, to suit different situations. But the variations of attention are typically threaded along by central themes or gameplay conceits, and even an abrupt shift in gameplay creates a posture of attention that is informed by the posture before.

Now, those conventional elements of gaming (graphics, mechanics, et al) naturally contribute to the somatic gestalt, but in most cases you could swap one or several of these elements, and it would feel like “the same” game. Asset swaps are the most superficial and obvious: playing Skyrim with outrageous character substitution mods changes the somatic animal only slightly. What about changing the inputs and therefore the haptic expectations? Playing Tekken with a fishing controller affects the somatic animal somewhat, but not radically. Despite the dramatic change in haptic response, there remains within the screen unchanged elements: aesthetic, timing, sense of weight, and so on. (Outside the screen, timing and sense of weight are likely altered through the haptic substitution, and this contributes to the somatic variance).

Description of these differences is difficult, but the somatic qualia of games are known to all. To some degree, it’s an inherent feature of digital media. We know that there is something-that-it-is-like to pick up a coin in Mario. We can recognize that it is of the same nature to pick up a ring in Sonic, or a doodad in Banjo-Kazooie. The form and function of these collectables can be totally distinct, from a gameplay perspective, but still identifiable as the same thing. In these examples, they are all attached to the same verb: “picking-up.” But the same somatic object can take on less familiar forms, and is still identifiable as the same. How about the credits sequence of Smash Ultimate? The player is flying through space firing bullets at swarms of targets. Though it superficially resembles the satisfactions of a shmup, the somatic object that results is similar to the picking-up examples. There is also Danger Danger, an arcade game exclusive to Two Bit Circus, an experimental LA venue, where the player rolls a ball through a minefield. Upon grazing the edge of the mine, it bursts with a little noise and gives you a yield of points. Nothing is being picked up in this case! But the somatic itch is the same.

When pressed, most players can account for their somatic experiences to some degree, but truly the language has not developed in any significant way. Part of the reason is the softness endemic to interactive media; for reasons besides the somatic, the affective responses are more beholden to subjective, inner experience. Maybe we need gamers (and game developers!) to get hip to poetry. Haha. Not really. But something in that zone. After all, poets are the mechanics of collective perception.

Brushing the Edge of Language and the Conversations We Could Be Having The postures of attention elicited by gaming are part of the reason that it is important to perform psychological readings of games. Whether or not the somatic relationship to the game actions is realized, they are still encoded in the unconscious of the body. By playing a game, players are inherently performing psychological self-mediation. This point is much elaborated in my essay on that subject.

The Dark Souls games are unusually sophisticated in this regard, so I find myself exploring them quite often. The somatic animals of Souls games are particularly well defined because of the meaningful relationships between the aesthetic, the mechanical, and the philosophical attributes of objects and scenes. The dynamism between these elements is always what produces the somatic animal, but in the case of Dark Souls these correspondences appear to be deliberately cultivated. An environment is never an arbitrary coat of paint over the gameplay of that sequence, and the same goes for the philosophical purport of the section. Therefore, even if someone is not considering the philosophical content of an area, they are still playing through the same subject from which that content derives. Knowingly or not, they participate in the philosophy. This is the negotiation with the somatic animal. That said, this is always happening in any game. But because of the lack of meaningful relationships between the components of the game—the organs of the somatic animal—our game experiences are too often disposable. However, if we cultivate our awareness of the somatic subject of games, if we begin to acknowledge this synaesthetic content, more appropriate language will emerge from it, and we can begin to build more refined and enduring games. (Of course, the language we currently have is already an obstruction to our imagination—right now, “refinement” sounds like we’re talking graphics and tight controls, and “enduring” is used to mean addictive! But we’re asking for much more.)

Let’s return to Dark Souls for a bit to experiment with something. If we were to discuss purely the somatic affect of some part of a Souls game, with no native language to employ, how would we do that? I suppose we should start with something conspicuous. So much of the Souls identity is its level design. From a bird's eye view, a psychogeographical reading of Dark Souls would assume something like a constellation of an area's archetype through its bonfires. It is the gestalt of these nodes and their tableaus that tells us what an area is "about" ... but what are these nodes individually? Facets of the underlying principle? Is there any way to develop this model further?

Bonfires are essentially checkpoints. Even in very old games, a lot of the time you'll find checkpoints after a set sequence or a "theme," and in that case, it's easy to correlate the checkpoint with its sequence. The identity of an area emerges clearly in such cases. For example, classic shmups often have keynotes to their challenges, like "this gauntlet is about curved arcs" or "this sequence is about vacillating from one edge to another."

Part of the praise for Dark Souls' level design comes from appreciation for tightly organized sequences and gauntlets. When these designs succeed, those sequences become just as memorable as bosses. In DS1 the Anor Londo archers segment, for example, stands out because it's a unique challenge. While the same general challenge of dodging projectiles through narrow passage may recur, it never feels quite the same; this is the only time you have to distribute your attention into this specific shape. Aiding the strong sense of identity is the fact that this situation is really only solved and overcome once.

Aesthetic components that contribute to that identity include the setting: a city whose architecture suggests it is “too big” for the player; and which is immaculately clean, and rests high in the heavens. This conveys intimidation, physically, culturally. It is bathed in twilight, conveying the promise of something. This particular sequence is on a steep incline, which supports both the feelings of being outmatched, and that of promise. Weaker projectiles (lightning) are thrown around the player on the way to this point. If a player learns they can tolerate these weaker missiles, they are then extra deflated when blasted back by the giant arrows. When the archers are eventually approached, they are revealed to be not mere people, but taller, heavier, with inhuman poise. The flavor of this intimidation, the atmosphere of the challenge, are appropriate to the nature of what the challenge is on a purely mechanical level. If the player were facing an identical sequence, but traversing along a wooden walkway over a swamp, or with goblins firing these arrows, or whatever, it would not form the same somatic experience. This is a very basic example of how the somatic animal derives in part from aesthetic elements, and how its character becomes clearer when they are related purposefully; but of course there are many more contributing organs in the body than these. The philosophical correlates tend to be more personalized: the great city in the sky could symbolize an authentic heaven to one player, a false authority to another, an astral realm of temptation to a third, and so on. Whatever associations a player accrues un/consciously as they face this challenge also join the somatic gestalt.

Most game analysis people are aware of the whole "games that teach by design" thing, but the conversation all too often resolves with the sentiment that it’s good when games do this. Or for developers, the question is "how do you build a game to do this?" In either case, example after example is thrown around, but there is no digging into the somatic affect of any of them. We recognize the satisfactions of the player’s progress, but we typically aren’t analyzing what qualities are being solicited by these challenges. Take the case of something like Megaman or Shovel Knight level analysis. "Okay, we introduce the concept of the disappearing platform: the first time is low risk, then it's higher risk, and requires a more precise jump. Then we introduce a new behavior in that same type of platform (and indicate visually) etc..." But there's something more to it. When you introduce a gameplay theme, and elaborate on it, and twist it, what is the accumulation of it? All we can say is "oh, it's the disappearing platform level" because we have absolutely no vocabulary to discuss this specific partition of attention that is being conditioned and developed, let alone the attitudes that correspond with it. There is something that it is like, somatically, to sink into a pattern, to sync with a game's expectation. Something is happening to the mind of the player as these micro-skills are being developed. It is not just forming new capacities to act within the game; it is the establishing of new recognitions of processes and situations, many of which have applications in other internal (psychological) events, or even in the external irl world.

The lack of available language isn’t due to laziness or intellectual disinterest; it is rather from our desensitization to the somatic experience. Wine tasting provides a handy allegory: being a good wine taster isn’t about describing the sensory experience in precise or beautiful language. Obviously that's an asset, but the essential skill is sensitivity to your own impressions, and being honest about them. This is difficult because there's little common cultural infrastructure around the sensation of taste, so people start muting themselves to their own impressions. Speaking far more broadly, we're given a wealth of data about the world around us that we are constantly ignoring, because we are conditioned to think it's irrelevant. When it comes to the somatic content of games, as anything else, coding the experience into language is not a cause of sensitivity atrophy, but a symptom! With or without the support of language, if you take time to be present with your somatic experiences—wine or games or anything else—they begin to unfold new dimensions, styles, flavors, shapes. And this content, even when elusive and unnameable, can be helpful in understanding the superficial gestalt.

Alienation from the Body My wish for the gaming world to develop deeper somatic sensitivies—and broader linguistic fluencies in service of them—is not just so that we can become more refined dilettantes of gaming, or even that better games will result (which they will). The longing mostly derives from what I feel is a necessity to understand these virtual worlds, because it is becoming clearer all the time that our participation in these worlds has unknown psychological consequences. There are at least two effects of gaming that are, according to Franco “Bifo” Berardi, already contributing to conditions of crisis. One is the dissociation of language learning from the bodily affect (this includes the somatic animals we’ve been exploring); the second is the virtualization of the experience of the Other. As I see it, these two are inextricable to some degree, and while the second effect is perhaps the more visible and the more dire, it is the first effect which is most pertinent to this essay.

It should be no surprise that in projecting one’s consciousness into a game, that person may begin to ignore the information of their body. Consider Chen Rong-yu, one gamer among many who, mind immersed in a game, straight-up dies in a gaming café. To cite a less extreme example, many of us have probably had the experience of a foot falling asleep, or becoming super hungry during a gaming session, unrealized until we put the controller down. Beyond these obvious body responses, there is a wealth of other, subtler information that our bodies are constantly giving us. Given our current relationship to the act of gaming, it is inevitable that some of this information will be ignored as we abstract our awareness more and more in a gaming session, confining ourselves to the virtual, becoming disembodied. Yet in this disembodied state, within the game, we are making choices, communicating, relating, learning, conditioning ourselves. There is still a fat pipeline of information coming through, but it is overwhelmingly mental, and minimally somatic. This is how language comes to resemble code. The somatic and affective material is lost as the abstraction becomes more extreme. (A look into the style by which gamer lingo mutates is a good indication of that!)

To really understand the inhumanity of this situation, Berardi, referencing Luisa Muraro, follows the somatic component of language to its primal place:

Access to language is fundamentally linked to the affective relation between the body of the learner and the body of the mother. The deep, emotional grasp on the double articulation of language, on the relation between signifier and signified in the linguistic sign, is something is rooted in the trusted reliance on the affective body of the mother. When this process is reduced to an effect of the exchange between machine and human brain, the process of language leaning is detached from the emotional effect of the bodily contact, and the relation between signifier and signified becomes merely operational. Words are not affectively grasping meaning, meaning is not rooted in the depth of the body, and communication is not perceived as affective relation between bodies, but as a working exchange of operating instructions. We can expect that psychic suffering will soon follow.

The disembodied linguistic state is not fully endemic to the time spent playing the game. With enough time and attention spent in the virtual, becoming accustomed to the “merely operational” abstraction of language, it begins to bleed into the irl. The person becomes unaware of the affective information of the body even while walking around in it. Since the body is the home of myth, and therefore meaning, and its affects are the substance of those structures, it is easy to see how alienation from the body often results in extreme nihilism. This is far more likely the primary link between video games and mass shootings, rather than the violent content of certain games. The actual violence of gaming is the severing of the person from their own somatic awareness.

If games continue to be addictive, while also sensational and superficial, inconsiderate of the way that their elements combine together and are digested in the unconscious of the player, we’re going to continue to find scores of gamers alienated from their own bodies and reduced to a state of hopeless nihilism. This doesn’t always turn violent, but it can. In many case the violence is self-directed. In the virtual world, our problems grow more complex, but they do not always necessitate any kind of affective fluency. In the meat-world, our problems grow more complex, and we still have our bodies, so the problems will therefore always comprise affective elements. As it stands, most of our crises demand greater affective fluency than before, but our collective time spent in virtual worlds has left that capacity to decay.

Sensibility itself is at stake, here. Sensibility is the faculty that allows human beings to understand those signs that are not verbalized, and that cannot be reduced to words. Sensibility (and sensitivity, which is the physical, erotic face of the non-verbal ability to understand and to exchange meaning) is the interpersonal film that makes possible the empathic perception of the other. Empathy (the ability to feel the pleasure and the sorrow of the other as part of our pleasure and sorrow) is not a natural emotion, but rather a psychological condition that is cultivated and refined, and which, in the absence of cultivation, can wither and disappear.

In asking for better language for talking about games, it must be stated that such language only really matters if it is used toward reconciling us with the body. Having a bunch of extra descriptors for games is not the point, the point is building comprehension of the gameplay experience. We know how to build games; we know how to execute actions in games. We have absolutely no idea how to play games.

___ Berardi, Franco. Heroes. p48-49

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tanadrin · 6 years ago

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Map Editors I Have Known And Loved

Much as my favorite part of any RPG is the character creation screen, my favorite part of any RTS (and many other genres of video game) is the map editor, where it’s included. This is a brief review of different map editing experiences for different games based on the time I’ve spent with them.

Warcraft 2

One of the first, wayyy back in the dark days of the mid-90s. Good for little besides making melee maps, really, due to the absence of a trigger system (as I recall).I was too young to really be able to experiment with its mechanics, and mostly used it as a glorified version of a Paint program, because I liked Wc2′s distinctive art style.

Age of Empires 2

AoE2 is/was a freaking terrific game, but (and probably because the campaigns the game shipped with didn’t need more than it provided) the trigger system of its in-game editor is not super sophisticated. Third-party editors and utilities supplement the default modding tools, and modding AoE2 is easier than ever with the HD edition, but if you want to do something super elaborate you’re going to need to do a lot of quirky tricks and editing of database values. I still love the AoE2 map editor, because I love building huge elaborate isometric recreations of medieval European cities, and then wrecking them with a giant army of Elite Mangudai and trebuchets.

Deus Ex: GOTY Edition

An FPS, but it came with a variation on the Unreal engine level editor that was, despite requiring a fair bit of knowledge about the engine to make it really useful, was still great for a kind of conceptual Lego, building beautiful austere environments with careful lighting you could walk around in (and shoot up with a GEP gun). Again, I was a little too young and a little too impatient to master the subtler aspects of DX level design, like triggers and scripting and whatnot, and the tools provided, though powerful, didn’t hold your hand at all. Still, full marks for making the inner workings of the game robustly exposed to modders.

Starcraft

The original Starcraft and the BW expansion have a lot to recommend them: a great kind of redneck-punk scifi aesthetic, some seriously fun campaigns, and some seriously fun multiplayer (the panic instilled by “nuclear launch detected,” etc.); the map editor was great because it had pretty decent unit editing capabilities, and an extremely good trigger system--plus you could make your own voiced mission briefings, string missions together as campaigns, etc., etc. A lot of what you couldn’t do was supplemented by third-party editors, and playing around with SC’s trigger system trying to get all kinds of weird things to work laid a lot of the cognitive groundwork for learning how to think and clarify ideas when I started learning actual programming languages like Python. Rates very highly on both the “purity of form” and “purity of spirit” scales, but it’s nothing compared to

Warcraft 3

Hoooooooo boy

I have a sentimental attachment to wc3 map editing like nothing else. There were whole summers I spent playing custom games on battle.net, and probably thousands of ideas I played around with in the editor itself, but never quite finished, because let me tell you, this bad boy is as far as I’m concerned the gold standard for map editors. It was released in a somewhat limited form with RoC, but around the time TFT came out, they updated the editor to a much more full-featured version, and they eventually also released all the plugins necessary to make Wc3 models with third-party programs. Combined with the idiosyncratic-but-actually-kinda-useful form of custom game searching, the result was, as anyone with a passing familiarity with the wc3 modding scene probably knows, one of the greatest flowerings of modding creativity in video game history. Out of this crucible of innovation came among other things a deep vein of tower defense maps, elaborations on the Aeon of Strife custom games from SC, and out of those, eventually, the DotA maps--leading to DotA Allstars and thence DotA 2.

The Wc3 editor lets you fuck with literally every conceivable value in the game, comes with an exceedingly powerful trigger system, lets you make custom units and abilities and buildings, and where it can’t do what you want it to, also just lets you script shit directly. I love it so much. It is my happy place; the little “doot doo do do doot DOO” that sounds when you start it up gives me a jolt of delight every time, years later.

Homeworld 2/Homeworld Remastered

Honorable mention to the most fun I have ever had in a melee RTS with my pants on. The maps here are exceedingly simple: you edit them with a text editor. But true 3d space battles--true 3d gorgeous space battles with a 70s sci fi aesthetic--are impossible to underrate in my book, and it helps that the Homeworld series has genuinely delightful gameplay mechanics. It also has a pretty good modding scene, with the inevitable Star Trek and Star Wars and BSG mods, because while the game isn’t super easy to mod, and has nothing in the way of built-in modding tools, it isn’t actively hostile to modding the guts of it like some games I could mention (cough cough Paradox cough). Confession: I’ve never tried to mod HW2. I have played a shit ton of it, though, and I live in the vain hope that one day someone will be like, “You know what? Not only is it time to bring RTSes back, 3d space battles are actually the fuckin’ best,” and make another game like it.

Starcraft 2

I haven’t played around as much with the Sc2 editor, because while I played a lot of Sc2 melee during WoL and HotS days, the actual experience of finding custom games with SC2 blows. Rather than Wc3′s “here’s all the custom games currently going, knock yourself out bub” thing, with Sc2 they tried to start a curated game list thing and added rating games and all this other wacky stuff that means it’s actually kinda impossible to find things 1) that you like and 2) that people are actually playing. I haven’t touched Sc2 in years, though; maybe it’s gotten better? I doubt it. The editor itself is, based on my limited experience, just the natural iteration of the Wc3 editor: a little more robust, possibly a little more confusing at first as a result, but it’s got that same classic Blizzard polish that makes their modding tools such a joy to use. But between the fact that the scifi aesthetic doesn’t appeal to me as much when it comes to making custom games, and the sucky game finding interface, I think I’m mostly holding out for WC3: Reforged to scratch that RTS modding itch.

DotA 2

Valve did the community a huge solid and released its developer tools to let people mod its hat collecting/racial and homophobic slurs archiving engine, DotA 2, but the custom game search features suffer from the same problem that plagues SC2, only even worse. Just give me a fucking server browser!!!! FPSes had this solved in like 1994!!!

It doesn’t help that DotA is built in what is fundamentally, like, an FPS engine (ok, probably that’s not an accurate characterization, but it is the engine they devised for like Half-Life 2 and TF2), which means that the developer tools feel clunky and counterintuitive and wayyy too complicated if you’re thinking of them as RTS modding tools. Plus, since not everybody has the time and the professional pride Blizzard used to have to create powerful, polished, standalone modding tools, they’re not gonna hold your hand at all. And the fact that MOBAs/ARTSes have mostly colonized the space classic RTSes used to fill means that what you really have is, like, 5% of the assets you’d need to actually make an RTS mod for the DotA engine. It would probably be easier to make an FPS in the DotA engine than a true, Warcraft-style RTS. (Someone did once make an FPS in the Warcraft 3 engine. It was... actually kind of fun? But seriously goofy.)

If I were a smarter and more hardworking person, I could probably build an RTS-like thing in DotA’s modding tools, but I am not. Plus, there are elements of DotA level design that suffer from the same problems as

Later iterations of the Unreal engine

One thing I loved about the classic UT engine, which the original Deus Ex used, is that (though it was prone to frustrating geometry bugs) it let you tinker around with architecture directly in the space it provided. I played with the level editors of some later UT games (principally UT3, I think?), and with the push toward fancier graphics of later generations, there was also a push toward use of a lot more doodads and 3d assets in levels to provide what I would think of as basic architectural details. I’m sure there are solid graphical and programmatic reasons for this. I’m a dilettante at best at this sort of thing, and I can’t speak to those. But the downside of that was that unless you have some 3d modeling chops, and a measure of planning and patience, the sandboxy/creative appeal of dicking around in the level editor was much reduced. That’s not a criticism of the tools provided so much as it is a neutral observation and, perhaps, me mourning a little bit the fact that older, simpler games, by virtue of their simplicity, are often more amenable to modding. One thing we lose in an era of ever-more-elaborate triple-A titles is a fundamental transparency in how games are constructed; they become super complex, teetering programmatical edifices, and while that often allows for interesting new developments in gameplay (and shiny graphics!), for the person who wants to learn How Games Work by taking them apart and poking around, well, it’s harder. That’s one reason why I’ve never gotten into Skyrim modding, even though it looks awesome and super powerful.

(the U4 engine “map editor” equivalent is a suite of game dev tools, and sold as such, but I’m not really talking about standalone game dev tools that are meant to allow you to build a game from the ground up in this post, so that’s beyond the scope of what I’m interested in. Obviously the more general and powerful a modding tool is, the more it shades directly into that; and there’s something of an artificial distinction between a “total conversion mod” and “a new videogame,” like that between a musical and an opera, that mostly has to do with spirit and intent and marketing.)

EU4, CK2

I am including these because I love modding these games, even though the “modding tools” for them are Notepad++ and GIMP. It’s nothing but images and weirdly formatted text files (and little documentation), and it’s terrible and frustrating! But I love it! My big complaint is actually the lack of ability to alter fundamental game mechanics: everything you can change about the game easily is the accidence of it: its appearance, the map, what countries and characters you can control. The underlying mechanics--the spirit of the game--is frustratingly immutable, except via very clunky workarounds, and while I understand why you might not go out of your way to make these things easily manipulable (it’s a lot of extra work to uncertain benefit), and why Paradox games rely on an event-driven system that is both like and much unlike RTS trigger systems, it is a little disappointing. But EU4 and CK2 drive very different parts of my imagination (geography and politics and economics) than, say, Wc3 (strategy and fighting and tactical finesse), in the same way that Deus Ex drove yet another part (the architectural, the spatial, the atmospheric). One day, maybe, someone will invent a game that somehow captures everything I love about each, a kind of transcendental game of everything, with modding tools to match, but I doubt it, and I’m OK with it even if that never happens.

Honorable mention: the Civ series

4x games are moooostly outside my scope of interest here, but I do remember Civ2 having a terrific editor with lots of opportunities for modding buildings and techs, and the great thing was that units and cities and terrain were all just very simple images that you could edit with an in-game tool. SMAC/AX was also pretty moddable, had a built in scenario editor/cheat menu, and Civ 3/4/5 have fun map editing and scenario building tools. Turn based games appeal to me a little less inherently, because they lack the thing I love about RTSes, the “oh shit PANIC” moments where you reflexes and quick thinking become super important, but the Civ series does have great strategic and econ management elements.

Other games

There are whole genres of games--Sim City, Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, the building aspect of 4X games--that capture in small or large part what I love about map editors, with the same build-create-tweak-adjust cycle, though obviously on a distinct footing since they’re making them an actual game rather than a tool with which to create games. It scratches a similar itch, though: it’s all about combining aesthetic design with design of systems. I have a radical thesis which is that every game is improved with the inclusion of a map editor. The existence of a representational, navigable space is intrinsic to almost every genre of game (every game I can think of, though I don’t exclude the possibility that there are ones I haven’t thought of that don’t have that), and being able to use the same underlying rules--or to iterate on those rules--and apply them to a new space, especially a new space you can design for optimum fun rather than just relying on procedurally generated (inevitably samey) space, extends the life of games considerably.

My earliest and biggest interest is in RTSes with map editors, though, because I have a fervent, unquenchable love for the genre. Alas, as noted, it’s a genre that has never been super popular and is currently pretty marginal. THe challenges of making a good RTS engine--nevermind a fun-to-play RTS--are considerable, especially if you care about things like multiplayer (which is my favorite part of RTSes). A lot of entries in that genre now are in some sense hybrid. MOBAs, of course; but games like EU4 have RTSlike elements (and, being pausable, are in some ways the best of both worlds with regard to RTSes and turn-based games). I live in hope that the RTS genre will experience a minor renaissance one of these days, and we’ll get something worthy of being the successor to WC3 or AoE2. If you’re working on that--please, please, I’m begging you, release it with a map editor.

#video games #rtses #modding

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breeeliss · 7 years ago

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Chlonette and mermaids

this isn’t really very plotty but idk modern mermaid au i guess :P

words: 1961

Marinette looked into her old jewelry box and realized she was quickly running out of stock.

About the only things left inside that she was willing to part with were a stack of silver rings (fake silver probably, but that was Marinette’s secret) and a strange bronze bee broach that her aunt had gotten her for her birthday three years ago that Marinette never bothered to wear. She dug around her closet for her old hand mirror with the cracked handle and decided that all this was enough. It was probably time to start scouring thrift stores and street fairs, but she’d worry about that later.

She stuffed everything into her bag, grabbed a croissant from the kitchen counter, and started to make her way towards the pier.

It was early enough in the morning that not many people were by the beach with the exception of the occasional fisherman heading to the southern part of the pier with fishing rods and baskets full of bait. Marinette headed in the opposite direction until she came upon a part of the rickety, wooden banister that was damaged, leaving a hole just large enough for Marinette to slip past. She looked around her to make sure no one was watching before she squeezed through the gap and carefully started to shimmy down one of the posts until she was dropping down onto a small bank of rocks underneath the walkway.

Marinette squinted against the sunrise coming just over the horizon as she whistled a quick tune with four long notes and waited.

It only took a few seconds for a glimmering golden fin to breach the surface of the water just a few meters away. Marinette watched the ripples in the water begin to get closer to her until they finally started to swirl around her feet. A blonde head of hair carefully poked up from underneath the water. “Is the coast clear?”

“No one’s around, don’t worry,” Marinette assured. “You can come up.”

“Oh, wonderful.”

Chloe leaned her hands against the bank of rocks and carefully lifted herself up to sit right next to Marinette, stretching her long golden tail out in front of her so that her scales could dry in the sun. She collected all of her hair in her hands and wrung out all the water, being careful not to disturb the chains of pearls she had braided throughout her hair. “You don’t usually come on Tuesdays. Don’t you open up the bakery in the mornings?”

“It’s a holiday today, so school’s out and the bakery is closed,” Marinette explained. “Thought I’d come visit.”

“You’re lucky,” Chloe smirked. “I was just out this morning looking for jellyfish.”

Marinette dug through her bag. “Jellyfish?”

“Of course, darling. Do you think my tail stays this smooth and shiny through will power? Proper tail maintenance is important. It’s downright tragic how other mermaids tend to neglect that.”

“Don’t jellyfish sting?”

“Oh, they do! But the tingle it leaves afterwards is worth it. That means it’s working.”

Marinette chuckled and made sure to file away that little mermaid factoid away for later. She pulled out the stack of silver rings, held it up to the light, and handed it to Chloe. “It’s been a while since I brought you things to add to your collection so I’d thought I’d bring some things by.”

Chloe gasped and snatched it out of Marinette’s hands, rolling it around in her palms and marveling at the way the metal shone in the light. “Oh, they’re so bright!!!”

“Yeah, I thought you might like them. I’ve only worn them once and they’re too big for me so I don’t use them very often.”

Chloe slipped the rings on all of her fingers and found that they were also too big to fit snugly. “That’s okay. I can probably figure out a way to turn it into a hair clip or something. It’s really hard to swim sometimes with your hair getting in your face.”

“I know it’s not diamonds or rubies or anything like that, but you’re good at finding good uses for random things.”

“Ah, finding beauty in even the most lowly of places,” Chloe sighed, fluttering her lashes with a smile. “It’s the saint in me.”

Marinette rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Alright. Your turn.”

Chloe tapped her finger against her lips before searching the dozens of baubles and doodads she had hooked onto the gold chains hanging around her hips like a belt. It took her a couple of minutes to find what she was looking for, but eventually she cheered and handed Marinette a compass that was caked in dried sand and looked to be a couple hundred years old.

Marinette opened it and found that the needle was stuck and wouldn’t move no matter how much she turned her body. “Huh. Is it broken?”

“Oh I have absolutely no idea what it is,” Chloe said distractedly as she tried to pry apart the rings and twist them into a different shape. “I’ve had it for ages, but it doesn’t do anything and it’s rather big and ugly.”

Marinette scowled. “So you gave it to me because it’s ugly? Thanks a lot, you brat.”

“What? You’re a human. That nonsense was invented by humans. It’s perfect for you. Anyway, what’s it supposed to do?”

“It tells you which direction you’re traveling in. The needle in the middle is supposed to always point north but I think the mechanism is off. Probably belonged to a sailor or something.”

“That’s a stupid old thing to have. Why not just look up at the stars?”

Marinette shrugged. “I’m not much of a sailor so I don’t know whether people still look at the stars. I think compasses are just easier.”

“So how do you get around?”

“GPS mostly. A lot of cellphones have them.”

“What’s a GPS?”

“Oh, it’s uh….it’s like a thing that tells you where you are at all times. You just check your cellphone and it’ll tell you exactly where you are. Cellphones are like little boxes we can use to call people and find out information and all sorts of cool things.”

Chloe rolled her eyes and started to twirl the ends of her hair between her fingers. “Sounds boring.”

Marinette smiled. “Boring, huh? Well, then I guess if it’s so boring I’ll just take the rest of this stuff home with me. You probably won’t be very interested in it anyway – ”

“Hold on a second!! Let me see what you have, don’t just go!”

Marinette always thought that thing in The Little Mermaid about mermaids collecting human things was just something that people made up for the sake of storybooks. But it turns out that it was founded on a lot more truth than Marinette realized. Chloe didn’t really care much for the functionality of the things that interested her. Her favorite things were trinkets that were broken or useless but looked extremely pretty. All things shiny, precious, and golden immediately enchanted her, and she always found a way to turn it into a charm for her belts, a new ring, a new bracelet, a new hair accessory, and countless other strange purposes that Marinette was sure only ever made sense to a mermaid. Marinette learned not to question it. Besides, she as able to convince Chloe into making this like a gift exchange once a week so that Marinette could get something interesting from the ocean as well. Besides, it wasn’t often that people could say they were friends with a mermaid.

She managed to exchange her hand mirror for a vial of crushed sea urchins that doubled as nail polish and exchange her bee broach for a pair of earrings that were actually just broken shell pieces attached to what looked like an old, thin fishhook. Strange gifts, but Marinette didn’t want to be rude by refusing them. Besides, she was more interested in the stories that went along with Chloe’s gifts rather than the gifts themselves. Chloe’s picky, snooty, and sarcastic behavior became tolerable whenever she told one of her tall tales. It wasn’t everyday that you got to listen to adventures about swimming to the United States, diving down into the ocean until it was too dark to see, dodging storms, and scouring ship wrecks. Marinette was tempted to take the time to find Chloe a really amazing and expensive gift only so that she’ll get some fantastical story in return.

“Oh!” Chloe exclaimed after she put away her presents, her tail splashing around the surface and soaking Marinette’s pants with seawater. “I totally forgot to tell you! I found the most amazing thing the other day and I think you’d love it!”

“What?”

“I found this old rowboat near my home that must have sunk a few years ago,” Chloe started explaining. “But there was a trunk in the back that had a bunch of clothes in them. Sort of like what you’re wearing, but there were so many more things. Like those strange things you put on your feet to walk around. These wire-things that have two circles of glass on them that I think you may need to look through. And head things! Stuff that go on your head. Hats? Yeah, I think they’re called hats.”

Marinette giggled. “Did you take anything?”

“No, I have to go back,” Chloe said. “But I figured I’d come and ask you if you wanted some of it first. You said you sew clothing and things right? I mean the clothes are a little dirty but they should still be okay with a few washes. Remind me. I’ll bring the trunk over next time.”

“Oh perfect! I won’t have to buy fabric later.”

“You….buy fabric?”

“Don’t start.”

Chloe lifted her hands. “Okay, okay, fine. Humans are confusing and ridiculous. Get used to it. I’ve got it.”

“I was saying,” Marinette continued. “That if you managed to bring those old clothes back I can bring you some bakery sweets.”

Chloe’s eyes lit up. “Sweets?”

“Mmhm. With sugar and honey and milk and all sorts of things you don’t have in the ocean. Trust me, I have a couple more things you might like.”

“Ohhhh, is it going to make me fat?” Chloe asked, pressing her hands to her stomach. “I promised myself I would go on a bit of a diet this month.”

“A small amount won’t do anything, so I’ll only bring a couple,” Marinette promised. “Besides, you have a pretty bad sweet tooth ever since I brought you those cookies the first time and I feel like I just have to keep enabling you since it’s too far gone to stop.”

Chloe smirked. “Revisiting an old shipwreck and plundering for treasure in exchange for sweets is almost universally worth it.”

Marinette laughed. “Nice to know we’re on the same page. I’m off again tomorrow, so maybe I’ll bring them then.”

“You better,” Chloe warned. “I’m going to break a couple of nails getting this trunk for you, so the least you can do is pay in human food.”

“Your sacrifices will be most appreciated.”

“Was that sarcasm?”

“in front of you? I’m offended you would think so.”

“I’ll have you know it’s a lot of work to make my nails this strong.”

“What, is there special mermaid nail maintenance that I should know about?”

“You know? It’s funny you should say that – “

“Oh no no no, stop, I was kidding, I don’t want to hear it!”

“ – because as a matter of fact there is! Oh, it’s good you don’t have any plans today because this might take a while. You see, there’s this special kind of moss you have to get, right….”

#miraculous ladybug #chlonette #ml #chloenette #obbsessedturtle #ask #chlonette fanfiction #miraculous ladybug fanfiction #my writing #tumblr fic #request #chloe bourgeois #marinette dupain cheng

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dreamtimeagain · 4 years ago

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Below and before me was a vast dark island and a deep ocean as far as I could see. The world seemed small as I towered over it, and it shifted with me as I peered around. The island was shadowed as if it was nighttime, the dense tropical forest featureless as it stretched out in the distance. The only light came from a large structure built on the edge of a cliff that towered over the waves below.

It was tall, and built of small stones with many arching windows that glowed with the warmth of fire. The front of the building had two massive columns that reached from the flat roof, all the way down, past the edge of the cliff, and into the water below. Huge metal doors stood ajar between the two columns facing outwards, and the stone building stretched back into the trees.

As I leaned in to get a closer look, I heard the mumble of voices and saw shadowed movement in the light from the fires. A narrator, with a conspiratorial voice, spoke of the 'revenge of the goblins' and an event that would lead to their downfall, and the loss of their voices.

Then I was standing in the building itself. It was a massive forge, with a large metal platform dominating the stone structure. Standing on the steel plate was half a dozen scrawny men. They were not humans, but greenish skinned with pointed ears and snubbed noses, their bodies clad in scraps and straps.

Between the creatures there was a massive black stone, it's edges rough with hints of something shiny that caught the glow of the torches that lined the walls. They wrapped it repeatedly in a heavy black cord as thick as their arms, and then they scurried away from the platform.

With a shock of blue-white light, the stone sparked violently with electricity, and began to melt into the floor. The goblins all covered their eyes and shouted to each other, their words unclear to me. With one last crackle of light, the liquid stone flowed across the platform and over the edges, following channels in the floor and pouring into a large steel mould at the lower end of the room. The goblins all cheered as the noise calmed and the electricity faded away.

As I leaned over to look into the mould, I saw a shiny silver pool of metal forming into the shape of an ingot. It was massive, and the goblins could barely see into it as they worked together to shift their creation down along some rails to the large steel doors that opened into the ocean.

As they shoved the doors open, I could see that the rails arched gracefully out over the waves and into a large tunnel that slowly tilted the castings downwards. I leaned in to look into the tunnel and I could see a whole row of steel troughs filled with silver ingots cooling in the ocean breeze.

When I returned to the stone forge, the goblins shoved the steel doors closed behind me, and worked to clean up the mess from their efforts. The cording that had been wrapped around the black stone was now in pieces all over the platform and the goblins pulled them over to a large pile of scraps in the corner.

As they worked, several of them were talking at once, holding a couple of friendly and excited conversations, but the one I could understand wasn't as happy as the others. He complained that they needed more ingots before they could strike back at their foes, and the only stones that were left over from this ancient forge had all been used up.

He explained to one of the younger looking goblins that the forge had once belonged to men, who could weild magic as a force, instead of the gentle innate magic of all 'natural' beings. The men had dredged the ocean floor for these large stones so there was no way for the goblins to get more, at least, not without the help of a human, a sentiment that he admitted with a look of disgust.

As I watched them, looking down at the room as if I was hanging from the celling, I had a sudden thought that dinner needed to be made, and I stepped away from their plight. As I did so, the whole scene faded away, like some kind of vr game, and I was standing in a living room.

It was night time and I had been standing in the middle of the living room, surrounded by black leather furniture and a low white popcorn ceiling. I had a game controller in my hand, and a large black game console stood about two feet high in the middle of the red carpeted floor.

Placing the controller down on the arm of the couch and I walked away from the game and headed to the kitchen, intent on starting some chicken soup. In the fridge was a few large containers of food, and it took some digging before I found the broth and chicken I needed. I debated for a moment about including a few extra ingredients before tossing everything into the white crockpot on the counter.

As I returned to the game, I faced the console and the stone forge reformed around me. The goblins were clearing the last of the wires away, and one of them was still live. The end sparked and glowed as one of them dragged it across the plate. He noticed it was still live, and picked up the other end, which wasn't actually attached to anything.

As he lifted the far end of the wire, the sparks intensified and shimmered out of the near end of the wire, like a garden hose dripping the last of the water as it gets rolled up for storage. When the bulk of the sparks had died away, the goblin lifted up the live end and stuck out it's tongue, licked the wire and giggled at the tingling that made his short scraggly hair stand on end, before shoving the cord onto the scrap pile with the rest.

Then the goblins all froze and looked with intensity towards the small wooden doors on the far side of the room. I strained my ears and eyes to catch what had startled them, and I could hear voices from the other side.

Stepping back, the scene zoomed out and there was now a sizeable human camp, not far from the towering stone structure that hid the goblins. There were a dozen or so people moving about the campsite, seemingly content in their knowledge that they were alone on the cliff side.

The humans were clearly far more advanced that the goblins, their campsite seemed midieval at first glance, but the details betrayed their technologies. The lights were artificial, and their gear and gadgets had the smoothness of machine-made uniformity. Amongst the camping crew was a single woman who stood away from the rest, gazing thoughtfully out into the dark ocean with a smile on her face.

She was excited about a chance to test her new technology and fire up the ancient forge that once fed the armies of her ancestors. She turned and pulled a device out of her hip pouch and pressed several buttons. Within the camp, a low humming began to overpower the voices and a large mechanical drone rose up from within one of the crates.

It was about the size of an overstuffed living room chair, and was vaguely round in shape. It's surface was draped in wires, whirring doodads and bright blinking lights. It had four mechanical arms with different grasping claws and one drill. As it floated over to hover in front of the woman, it's appendages all moved and clicked with the methodical precision of a systems check.

At the campsite were several more crates and as the woman directed the first drone towards the edge for the cliff, several others rose up to join in. The goblins watched in silence from several dark openings in the stonework, waiting to see what the humans were up to before deciding on a course of action.

The drones all floated off the edge of the cliff and slowly glided down to the surging waves below. Without hesitation they plunged into the depths and moved off into different directions. I followed them into the murky water, curious about their mission.

The ocean was cloudy with silt shifted from the motion of the waves. Each drone was delegated to a different section for the ocean floor as it puttered along, scanning and searching for something. In the murky depths we eventually found large shadowy lumps and the drones began to work.

They cleared away the mud and debris around several massive black stones, like the one from before that the goblins had liquefied. Each drone latched onto their own stone, and lifted them from the ocean floor. As the burst past the surface, drizzling ocean water and mud, they floated up the side of the cliff and onto the grassy clearing between the campsite and the ancient forge.

The goblins burst out from the forge, intent on seizing the prizes for themselves, hollering and screeching as they brandished their spears and rusted swords at the humans who had been waiting patiently for the return of the drones.

Instead of fear, as the goblins had expected, the humans reacted calmly, with smiles and welcoming words. They had known the goblins were there the whole time. These humans were sympathetic to the plight of the goblin people, and had set out to dredge the ocean for magic stones in order to help.

The goblins cautiously accepted the help from the humans, and began to forge the stones again. This time the humans powered the forge properly, turning on the huge turbines that provided the massive surge of electrical energy that was needed to liquefy the stones.

As each black stone was charged and poured into the ingot moulds, they would push them along the rails over the ocean waves and down into the tunnel. The new stones were not silver, but gold in color, and as each ingot slid down the tunnel it would slam into the previous ingots. With the impact the silvered ingots would slosh and lose some of their contents onto the tunnel floor. It was obvious that the goblins had failed to forge the stones properly.

The goblins were excited to finally be getting the right materials. All except for the one who had complained before about the location for the stones. He was not willing to trust the humans, and kept them at a distance as they worked. He turned to watch the latest ingot slide across the rails over the waves, and was struck painfully from behind...

...then I woke up.

#dream #lucid dreaming

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goarticletec-blog · 6 years ago

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I Embraced the PopSocket and It Changed My Damn Life

New Post has been published on https://www.articletec.com/i-embraced-the-popsocket-and-it-changed-my-damn-life-4/

I Embraced the PopSocket and It Changed My Damn Life

The first PopSockets gripper I plastered to my phone’s rear-end was a freebie gift thing I received from some company’s swag bag. Amidst the magnets, notebooks, business cards, and other marketing ephemera, there it was: the circular doodad that has leapfrogged selfie-sticks as the must-have mobile accessory for our smartphone-saturated society. When I fished it out of the tote, I felt secretly delighted. Then I felt sort of dopey.

I had long coveted the PopSockets gripper I saw on other people’s phones, but I had refused to buy one of my own. To me, they had a reputation as a frivolous tool meant to assist the selfie-obsessed, and I feared that once I had one, all my pictures would be front-facing and covered in animal ears.

When I pressed the PopSocket to my phone, the stiff glue felt more than semi-permanent—it felt world altering. Giving in to the gripper felt like an admission of my addiction to my phone, that my device is constantly in my hand or within reach. The alien bulge now attached to its back signaled that my phone is an extension of myself, and I had reached a place where I needed a tool to make it ergonomically more enjoyable to hold.

But it was done. The question was, would I like it?

I did. I do. I love it, actually.

I quickly embraced the PopSocket’s utilitarian benefits. Some were obvious, like how easy it was to hold and stabilize my phone; by pinching the extended gripper between my fore and middle fingers, I cast a visage not nearly as elegant as Betty Draper holding her menthols, but certainly less fatal. It built a little lean-to for optimal Netflix viewing, a perfect perch on the seat-back tray table during long flights.

My PopSocket has shifted from an embarrassing appendage to comforting safety blanket.

There were also advantages I didn’t anticipate. It lifted my phone’s back-end off of tables and surfaces, protecting the camera from scratches. It acted as an anxiety release valve; I extend and compress the accordion back over and over again, relishing the satisfying thrmp sound it makes as you press the button back into place.

The most surprising advantage was the extra layer of protection it provided. Last year, someone stole my phone out of my hand on BART, the Bay Area’s train system. I’d like to say it was not particularly traumatic, but in reality it activated a much deeper fear than I expected. That fear was initially about being robbed. But as I sat on the train, shell-shocked by what had occurred, my first reaction was to call someone for help or consolation. No phone. I knew my final destination, but if I hadn’t, no phone would have also meant no maps. No rideshare app to bail me out with a quick lift. As I sat there, mind racing, there was no Instagram or Twitter to distract me from myself. It felt weirdly dismembering. Since I’ve had a Popsocket gripper attached to my phone, I’m not as reluctant to use my device on the train. Even if it’s a strange placebo, the safety assurance was another unexpected pro.

Over the past six months, my relationship to my PopSocket has shifted from embarrassing appendage to comforting safety blanket—a portable one that was easily packaged on the back of my phone. Around me, I noticed others embracing the tool; the colorful plastic graft graced the phones of my family, my friends, and many colleagues. Still, it baffled me how soothing I found it, how warmly I felt about the solid, meaty grip. I wondered: How had such a seemingly inconsequential tool suddenly, and without warning, become a crucial part of my everyday life?

It turns out, David Barnett, the PopSockets grips creator, had wondered that same thing.

The PopSocket prototype was not an intuitive sell. Barnett, a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado, created the first iteration in 2010 after becoming frustrated by the constant tangling of his headphone wires. As so often is the case, the soil of frustration proved fertile ground for enterprising innovation. Barnett bought some clothing buttons from a local JoAnn’s Fabrics, affixed them to the backside of his phone, and voila, he was able to wrap his headphone wires around them.

“Within a week, I was trying to improve on the concept, mostly because people teased me so much about how absurd it looked,” Barnett told me over the phone. “I was trying to come up with mechanisms to get the buttons to expand and collapse for further functionality, and a little more respectable look.” Quickly he settled on trying to miniaturize an accordion mechanism, the kind of collapsible tool that you might see in camping bowls or colanders. More than one hundred prototypes and many dev dollars later, things went from 30,000 grips sold in 2014 to 100 million by the end of 2018.

The strange shape that initially prompted snickers had a side benefit: It provoked discussion. When you see one, as I did, you’re skeptical. Then, you wonder, maybe that’s something I need?

Barnett found his accessory had a viral quality. He released PopSockets grippers with branded logos for companies like T-Mobile, Yahoo, Microsoft; word of mouth did the rest. “Everyday, people would ask, ‘What is that?’ Second question: ‘Where can I get one?’”

Still, Barnett admits, in the beginning, there was a common reaction when people first saw it: “‘That the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.’”

But these comments have been dissipating. “I haven’t heard that recently, I think because they’ve become accepted,” Barnett says. “When you give someone one and they use it for a couple of days, and you try to take it away, it’s really hard to use your phone without it.”

And so, they became that perfect little gift for swag bags or souvenirs—a vehicle to subtly shill for a brand or aesthetic that you love. ”Bumper stickers for your phone,” Barnett called them. (I’ll let you guess what logo is emblazoned on mine.)

But to me, my PopSocket is less of a brand statement, and more of a societal one. To use it, I needed to admit to myself how I use my phone (as an appendage of my body) and when I use my phone (constantly) and graft on a device that would let me do so with ease. If you were to boil it down to a bumper sticker motto, perhaps it would be “the medium is the message”—even if that medium is a tiny hunk of plastic.