#lessonsfromgaming

[willowbythebog]

There's this moment in Mass Effect 2 when one of your companions makes a comment about treating the Geth (a synthetic race of sentient robots with shared memories) the same as other species (other being organic here) and you can choose to give the Renegade (the fuck you I get shit done morality) option and say "The Geth aren't like us" or something similar, which Shepard (you) obviously intends in a racist, organics-first way, and your other companion, Legion (a member of the Geth race) turns to you and says "Exactly" and Shepard is low-key taken aback by this and Legions continues "We aren't like you; why should your morality be applied to us?"

And like, this whole thing between synthetics and organics is a big conversation across this game and the next in the series and brings questions of inclusivity and understanding and idk, I think about it a lot.

The idea of wanting to treat other people in ways that I think are good is a pure intentioned one, but all of us are different and what "good" looks like is different, and the games take this idea and make it very stark and dramatic, but the core idea is there.

I think about this a lot.

[vampirebiter]

never show up to a fight unprepared. always make sure you bring your battle butt plug and that it has fresh batteries. #LessonsFromGaming

[fidgetwidget]

2 unposted posts and the one who took their place

I am starting to build up a good little collection of unfinished blog posts that I don't think I'll ever be going back to (for a number of reasons). That's the trouble of having ambition beyond your means... you tend to start towards a goal that you don't have the stamina to actually reach.

So, getting back to more short form posts that I can actually complete, but wanting to still keep the essence of my ambitious idea, I've come up with something that is slightly longer than my #gamedevidea tweets that pulls a short list of solid usable ideas from existing games that could be applied to just about any other game project.

This will just be sampling, to help explain how this works, and hopefully spur on some of your own ideas in the process.

1) Super Mario Bros

Momentum through animation helps to make fake physics more fun.

Teaching lessons early helps reduce the frustration of failure through death.

Consistency in art design can help express measurements with subtly. 

Pausing gameplay when hit can help player recovery.

2) Bionic Comando

Designing with limitations can help initiate more creative solutions.

Basic navigation in a platformer can be fun, and provide gameplay depth.

Simplicity in sound design can still create meaningful atmosphere.

There is still plenty of room for platformers to innovate. 

Hopefully this helps explain what I hope to do with this type of post going forward... and please provide feedback :D

-fidgetwidget out

[willowbythebog]

I have strong feelings regarding the Thorian from ME1, and specifically, the killing of it. Put simply; I don't think Shepard had *any* fucking business killing that creature.

To recap: it's an (at least) 50k year old sentient *planet spanning* plant creature that's seen the rise and fall of galactic empires and possesses the ability to mind control and make angry clones of people (which is largely why we kill it) and we kill it to save the lives of a group of colonists who've been controlled by it.

And like, right off the bat, yeah I get that it's not *great* that it's done that and it doesn't really play nice with us, but we made almost no attempt, even as Paragon, to try and peacefully resolve this situation.

Yeah, I know, it mind controlled people. BUT: the colonists are on its planet, it was here long before humans were and they're the ones who landed on it's space and started doing science and it was *other humans* who helped get them infected and there's no attempt to make them answer for that in the game. At all. So instead of trying to cure them or peacefully resolve things, we just kill this creature that individually has lived longer than every single other person involved *combined*

And that just feels *wrong* to me. I'll make another post about lifespan morality and how you apply laws/morality to creatures that are fundamentally not equal in their scopes (human vs 50k year old sentient plant, for instance) but for now:

It feels wrong to kill something older than time I can comprehend, for almost any reason. The Thorian just felt so beyond basic human comprehension and scope that meddling with it felt so bad, and yeah, I know we needed the information it had, and that gets really messy. I don't know if there were any good options, but I sure as shit didn't like the ones the game took.

[willowbythebog]

So, there's a lot of hate for Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams in the ME fandom, and as someone who *also* left her to die in a nuclear explosion, I clearly preferred Lieutenant Kaiden Alenko, but the hate against her brings up some interesting things.

Right off the bat; gamers, from early 2000s, generally not liking the primary strong/abrasive female NPC who doesn't take shit and doesn't randomly have an act 3 breakdown where she actually needs to be coddled? I'm shook. Preferring the two alien women who are awkward and bumbly and don't really push back on your decisions? Again, *shook*. Ash gets a lot of shit unfairly for that type of thing and more.

On the other hand: she's kinda racist and a bit of a PoS sometimes. She's very xenophobic and will jump pretty quickly to violence when Wrex is *understandably* upset about the idea of destroying a cure for his people and she is one of the advocates for genocide in the name of peace.

There was also a post that pointed out something really interesting: she's the main racist *human*. Namely, she's the most racist of the main collection of characters who aren't presented as bad (think Udina; he's portrayed as an ass the whole time, whereas Ash is one of the good guys). She's also human, and this makes what she says more *real*

We've never experienced the things the alien races have gone through and those are very obviously fantasy concepts, but a human being racist/judgemental/hateful/etc towards people that don't look or act like them? We see that in real life *all the time*

So the negative parts of her character are very real, whereas being a badass space marine isn't very real

So maybe that's why she gets more hate.

I personally am guilty of disliking her for both being strong/abrasive (I also was iffy about Garrus for that) and for being a racist PoS sometimes.

[willowbythebog]

Red vs Blue

Renegade vs Paragon

Turns out, when you distill Shepard (PoV character) to two personality options you end up having to bundle a lot of stuff together that isn't *great*

And like, I really appreciate that you can successfully complete the game with either morality and the game doesn't completely punish you for being an asshole, but also: this costs the game a lot

Characters that need to die refuse to surrender when Paragon would have arrested or spared them, characters that are important later get replaced with a lookalike if Renegade kills them.

On one hand, this leads to some wonderful lines like "You can't control other people's actions, only how you react" which Paragon says to Garrus after telling him not to kill a guy who then fights back and is killed and Garrus asks what the point was.

On the other hand, veryyyyyyy few consequences for being an asshole, which isn't great

[willowbythebog]

Okay, so I made a mass effect post yesterday and I've decided that I want to make a whole bunch more because I had so many thoughts and feelings and there're such interesting questions that get posed by these games. Now, for context, I'm a basic bitch who has played ME2 like 3 times through, but only got the full series recently and am playing through ME1 now. So the thoughts will follow my current playthrough of legendary edition but will be colored by having done the second game already.

And before I begin, I care *so little* about the effect your choices make in the game. From everything I know the devs dropped the ball with the endings and the morality system heavily encourages picking either red or blue and sticking with it for a different colored ending, so the thoughts are in the questions that get posed and their application to reality and where they made my brain go, not on in-game effects.

I'm too obsessive to not just pick the color of my current playthrough so my actual choices are boring 😂