#undertale encoded asks us anything
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Ash (base 64): she/they
Wants to leave
17
Can have red text when "free"
been there the longest, seen as a parent by the others
knows violet put them there, doesn't know why.
Hates the british
LOVES STEM
Had a brother. He died while she was trapped. She doesn't know.
Chara is her favorite undertale character
should be 37
Kai (morse): He/they
Happy being trapped
15
can have green text when "free"
most recent arrival. Everyone sees him as the baby
Got too used to the situation. scared to leave
Papyrus is his favorite undertale character
the one tasting the most
should be 35
Jeremy (binary): He/him
Wanted to leave at first, got used to it
16
can have blue text when "free"
Arrived after Ash. Seen as the forgotten middle child
Had a fear of death. Can't die now so he's happy
Likes vocaloid
Favorite undertale character is MK
Indifferent about grape flavor (others hate it)
should be 36
Sam (Caesar's cipher +7): It/its
Doesn't care about leaving anymore
18
can have orange text when "free"
Arrived after Jeremy. seem as the family dissapointment
sans is its favorite undertale character
should be 38
Violet (purple text): They/them
Is the captor of the others
34
trapped the others via soul transferring. (like Andy's apple farm)
The others did not arrive at the same time because it takes a month for a soul to fully transfer
The others used to be Violet's friends. That's why Violet wanted to save the others.
The others forgot everything so they aren't Violet's friends anymore.
Tried to help at first but it's become torment for the others.
is british
was 14 when it all started.
Mod stuff:
Here is my pronoun page! (for mod)
Tags:
#yummy! (Good taste)
#ew gross (bad taste)
#not tasted (other posts)
#yummy? (Confusing taste)
Main blog: @thatacefrog
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Encoded Asks #10 & #11
Nothing really spectacular here.
#undertale encoded#undertale#underswap sans#blueberry#jewel#undertale encoded jewel#undertale encoded asks#undertale encoded asks us anything
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Chaos Theory
Part Six
(Even after the disaster of the last part, there are more puzzles to solve. The three boys better hurry on this one, or else there will be consequences.)
They stopped only a few blocks away from the building, sitting on a street corner. Jackie made them stop, despite the fact that they all wanted to get farther away. He remembered the gamemaster’s warning about taking too long, and nerves started eating away at his stomach.
“Here, give me the laptop,” Jackie said. JJ handed him the box with the computer inside.
Chase watched as Jackie booted it up. “I...you know, I’m still not entirely sure what’s going on.” He sounded almost apologetic.
“We’re in Saw,” Jackie said, not taking his eyes away from the screen. “Some psycho decided to kidnap the group and threatened me with your deaths if I didn’t play his fucked-up game and solve his puzzles.”
Chase whistled. “Well, shit.”
“Yeah.” Jackie opened his email, finding another message from the same user as before. This one had a zip folder titled ‘Set 3′ attached. He quickly unzipped it, finding a few files inside: an image called 3.png, a folder called ‘3′, and a text file titled ‘open me first.’ Jackie did so, and inside was a single url. He opened the browser and copy-pasted the url into the search bar.
At first, the three of them found it hard to tell what they were looking at. The website was mostly black, with some white text, and a square that showed a dark video. Until they realized something was moving in the video. Jackie ran his hand through the box until he found the earbuds, plugging them into the laptop and putting them on. Suddenly, when he clicked the little sound icon on the video, he could hear the sound of rushing water and splashing, along with muffled cries and whimpers. His heart sank. “I’m gonna...” He turned up the brightness on the laptop.
Chase gasped. Jameson covered his mouth with his hand, eyes wide. Jackie leaned back. Marvin was in the video, bound and gagged. He was stuck inside a box with glass walls, small enough that he couldn’t straighten his legs. There was water slowly flowing into the box from a connected pipe. There was also a timer in the corner of the video, counting down: 55:12, 55:11, 55:10...
The time on the laptop’s clock read 3:03am.
“Is...is this live?” Chase asked.
“I think it is,” Jackie muttered.
“You can livestream shit like this?!” Chase shook his head. “Why haven’t the police—or whoever—why hasn’t someone stopped this?!”
“Well, firstly, because this video has probably only been active since tonight. And secondly, because you’d be surprised what goes up online.” Jackie leaned closer to the screen, looking around the website. “The Dark Web, you know? There are several sites that are like Twitch for sadists.” Unconsciously, he rubbed his left arm. “I don’t recognize this one, though.”
JJ snapped his fingers, drawing the other two’s attention. There is a timer in this video! he signed in obvious distress. And it’s counting down. I don’t think we want to find out what will happen when it reaches zero.
Jackie shoot his head. “You’re right. We need to hurry. My guess is that timer is how long it’ll take for that box to fill up with water, and then...” He shuddered, immediately closing the web page. “We have to find out where that is. And it’s going to be in the puzzles, just like before.”
He clicked on the 3.png image. It opened to a picture with a dark red background and black text reading: “SEEK THROUGH THE CATALOG, FIND WHAT’S BELOW.” The text was followed by that symbol of a skull inside a hollow circle, divided in four. Below the text were three black-and-white photographs with captions beneath them: a black wand with white ends labeled “Magic Wand,” a spread-out deck of cards labelled “Card Game,” and a white fluffy cat labeled “Norwegian Forest Cat.”
Jackie frowned. “Okay, I don’t know what this means other than some sort of instructions, so I’m just going to plug this image into the editing program and see if anything shows up when I play with sliders.”
It sounds like we’re meant to find those images in some sort of catalog, JJ figured. But what catalog?
“I dunno. Maybe it’s in that other folder. You know, that came with this?” Chase wondered.
Jackie paused. “Maybe. I haven’t found anything in this image yet, so we can look what’s in there.” He went back into the files and opened the folder labeled 3.
What was inside were countless black-and-white photos, all with names written in numbers and a few letters. “What the...?” Jackie scrolled down...and down...and down...until he grabbed the scroll bar with his mouse and pulled it all the way to the bottom. “There must be hundreds of images in here!”
“Jesus,” Chase muttered. “Uh, I think this is the catalog.”
“How are we supposed to find three pictures out of all these?!” Jackie threw his hands in the air. “That could take hours! W-we don’t have that much time!” Jackie clasped his hand over his mouth, trying and failing to keep his eyes from watering. “It was rigged. This whole thing was rigged, we were never going to win it.” He blinked, and tears started falling down his face. He’d been scrambling, frantically trying to complete puzzles and reach the locations quickly, only for this? For two of his friends to die without him being able to do anything about it? What a sick game this was.
“No no no no, there has to be a way,” Chase took the laptop, using the mousepad to scroll through the photos, eyes scanning in rows. “Maybe they’re really early on, and this is meant to discourage us.”
“Chase, I don’t think that’s the case.” Jackie buried his hands in his folded arms. He was shaking.
“No, listen, there has to be a way.” Chase didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “This guy’s a sick fuck, but he also has another set of puzzles after this, he’s not gonna rig it so you fail before getting to that last set. There has to be a way to find—” He stopped, eyes suddenly widening. “We can use the find feature.”
Jackie looked up with red-rimmed eyes. “The what?”
“The find feature, the search bar, it’s built in to your files.” Chase circled the mouse around the search bar in the upper right corner of the window. “We just need to know what the images are called.”
“Well, uh...I think he gave us the image names. In the other picture, with the instructions.” Jackie gently took back the computer, switching to the other image. “See? Magic Wand, Card Game, and Norwegian Forest Cat.” Jackie typed the first phrase, Magic Wand, into the search bar. Nothing came up.
JJ tapped Jackie’s shoulder for attention. All the photo titles are in that same code from before, he pointed out. Perhaps we simply need to encode the titles of the images we’re looking for?
Jackie suddenly threw his arms around JJ. “Jameson Jackson, you’re a genius.” He let go, then turned to his other side and hugged Chase too. “And you also, Chase! I don’t know if I’d have thought of the search.”
“Aw, it’s nothing,” Chase muttered, smiling a bit.
Really no problem at all, JJ signed.
“Well, I would’ve been stuck for a while. And time is of the essence.” Jackie opened up the same online code converter from before. He typed in the first phrase again, and then copied the result—4d 61 67 69 63 20 57 61 6e 64—and pasted it into the file search bar. Immediately, the image they’d been looking for popped up. “Yes!” Jackie shouted, punching the air.
“Wait, something’s up.” Chase leaned over and opened the image. There was a strange bit at the bottom, taken up with a white and black boxy symbol. “That looks like...I dunno, part of a QR code.”
“How much do you want to bet the rest of the code is in the other two images?” Jackie muttered.
After encoding the other titles and finding the images, it was clear that the QR code was split up between the three images. Jackie plugged all three into the photo editor, and arranged them next to each other so the code was complete. He patted his suit. “Fuck, do either of you have your phone?”
Chase checked his pockets. “No. I last remember setting it down on my desk, but then I passed out and woke up in that...place.”
JJ waggled his mustache, and pulled out his phone with a grin.
“Jays, I love you so much,” Jackie laughed. “Oh, the old-fashioned man is the one with the smartphone, how ironic.”
JJ passed it to Jackie. It’s very helpful. I’m trying to make a habit of keeping it on my person.
“That’s a good idea.” Jackie leaned back a bit as he tried to get the entire code in view of the camera. Then he snapped a picture, and a notification immediately popped up, saying the code had been understood and explaining what it would do. “This’ll take us to a website...” Jackie said, clicking on the notification to activate the code. The browser on the phone opened up,
Chase leaned over. “What’s that?”
“It’s a crossword puzzle.” Jackie groaned. He’d hoped the QR code would just give them the location to find Marvin, but no such luck. “Alright. Some of the squares are colored red, and at the bottom there’s this thing...” He scrolled down, and read out loud. “‘The address is 68′ and then a blank space. I bet we have to solve the crossword puzzle and then plug the letters from the red squares into this space to find the street address.”
Then what are we waiting for? JJ asked. What is the puzzle asking for?
Jackie looked through the hints. “Looks like a bunch of trivia...oh! I know the answer to number one! It’s Undertale.” Jackie smiled a bit. That was Marvin’s favorite game...thinking of Marvin, the smile faded. “Okay. Let’s go.”
By the time they finished, the clock read 3:25am. Piecing together the letters from the red squares, they came up with the address of 68 Aspen St. “That’s on the other side of town!” Jackie cried, distressed. “Okay. Okay, I can probably run there quickly, you guys will have to catch—”
“We can drive,” Chase suggested.
JJ frowned. Chase, I know you can drive, but you don’t have your car.
“There’s a car right there, in that parking lot.” Chase pointed diagonally across the street. There was indeed a single car in an empty lot. “Jackie, do you still know how to hotwire things?”
“Ah—I mean, yeah, but are we really about to steal a car?” Jackie asked tentatively.
It’s either that or let Marvin die! JJ signed furiously. We can return it after!
Jackie jumped at JJ’s sudden motion, but then nodded. “Yeah, guess it’s the lesser of two evils, huh?” He shut the laptop. “Alright. We have to hurry. If my math’s correct, we only have about half an hour before that timer counts down. Let’s go.”
#jacksepticeye#jacksepticeye fanfiction#jacksepticegos#septic egos#jackieboy man#jameson jackson#chase brody#marvin the magnificent#brigid writes fanfiction#chaostheoryfic
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Yes, video games are art, but are they artistic?
This is another essay I wrote - I don’t do this super often, but I was feeling particularly inspired on this topic tonight, so here it is.
A question I often see asked, usually by someone with an obvious bias or conflict of interest, is this: Are video games art? These days, the prevailing attitude towards that idea seems to be that they are, although that could easily just seem to be the prevailing attitude from my perspective because most people I ��know have a generally favorable attitude towards video games. At least from where I'm sitting, it seems like a tired, silly question - I imagine a college freshman pointedly answering "VIDEO GAMES!" when his Introduction to Art teacher asks about different mediums of art, and then being slightly disappointed when that professor doesn't try to argue with him about it. Of course, there are different definitions of what 'art' is and isn't, so I'll start by defining my own terms. To me, personally, there is no threshold of quality in art. In other words, anything made by anybody can be art, whether that person has a talented bone in their body or not - macaroni glued to construction paper by kindergartners is art, and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes are art. By my definition, then, of course video games are art - they have design and controls, they have images designed by visual artists, and they have music composed by musicians. Any and all video games are art - it didn't just happen when presenters at E3 started trying to target the Self-Important College Freshmen demographic. So Asteroids is art, Custer's Revenge is art, those battery-operated Game And Watch handhelds are art, and Flappy Bird, Neko Atsume, and Pokemon Go are art. Some of those are art in the same way that Tijuana Bibles or 'Spot the Difference' games in the funny papers are art, but by my definition, they're still art. In my mind, at least, that much is simple.
Where this discussion gets instantly a thousand times more complicated is whether they are artistic. This is what I think many people mean when they have conversations about whether video games are art - the implied question is not 'Is this something humans made to express themselves', but 'What is the value of this expression?' and, underneath that, 'Can we say it is as valuable as, for example, books, film, or visual art?' And THAT is a hairy, complicated question with a lot of different arguments to unpack and address.
I think, to take the previous thought just a little further, many people really want to discuss whether video games can teach us something about the human condition the way that literature or some movies or television can. This is what makes it a fun debate for people, because when video games were first invented and popularized, that answer was almost universally a resounding 'No'. At their inception, video games largely served the societal purpose of relieving children and older nerds of their pocket change - Jumpman's plight to rescue Paulina from Donkey Kong had no metaphor, allegory, or social/political commentary. Everything about its premise, down to Jumpan's mustache and large nose, was the direct result of working within the limitations of primitive hardware. As video games moved into the home market, they were still primarily targeted towards children (and nerds), with mostly bright, colorful mascots and cartoony aesthetics. So while they still met my (admittedly generous) standards for the definition of 'art' listed above, they did not pretend to probe the depths of the human soul. I imagine that changed sometime in the decade that saw the advent of text-heavy role playing games and the transition from two dimensions to three within the game space. In Search Of Lost Time these games were not, however - the closest analogue I could provide would be a Saturday morning cartoon show with action figure marketing tie-ins. It's only been in the last ten years or so that it seems like some people have really started to push that particular envelope, and, in my eyes, a lot of these efforts are pretentious or heavy-handed. I'm sure somewhere, someone has written a Thinkpiece on how those games with ~serious moral choices~ (see: Bioshock's decidedly unsubtle 'Will you rescue this innocent child or harvest their organs?') are advancing the artistic merit of the medium, and I hate that thinkpiece. Attempts to be more subtle with these ideas have certainly surfaced since the whole 'Would you kindly...?' thing, and some of those have, admittedly, presented much more interesting questions for debate. Much of these more interesting ideas in the 'commentary on the human condition' wheelhouse of video game design comes from indie developers who are setting out specifically to make us ask those questions. Just to name a few, Papers, Please puts us in the role of a government official in a bureaucratic dystopia and encodes its morality-based commentary in the actual gameplay; Undertale takes Bioshock's simple 'this or that' morality and flips it 180 degrees to be about how we consume video games. In fact, many of these games ask us what we can learn about ourselves based on the choices we make when we play video games, which makes for fun conversations but, in my mind, they lose a lot of their academic merit as soon as you try to apply those lessons to just about any other scenario. As much as I loved and bought into Undertale's unique take on video game morality, it has almost no real-world application. Outside of these examples, the bigger, more mainstream games have certainly become more cinematic, or, to perhaps narrow it down a bit, more like blockbuster films. Naughty Dog's Uncharted series has all of the genre hallmarks, snarky witticisms, and epic symphonic soundtracks of Marvel's Cinematic Universe, while their critically-acclaimed The Last Of Us puts us in approximately the same head space as AMC's The Walking Dead television adaptation. It's work that engages us mentally, in other words - we don't simply sit and absorb it, because it isn't so much statements as questions. Something that engages us, though, isn’t necessarily high art just for that fact. The works that are the most discussed and revered among narrative-driven mediums frequently have stories that affect many people on a deep, personal level, perhaps even altering their world view. To contextualize it, I’d put the artistic merit of most video game storylines/premises/scenarios somewhere in the middle of the scale that ranges from Antonio Banderas's performance as the Nasonex bee to Brian Cranston's performance as Walter White on the scale of 'what does this teach me about myself' - they're fun to think about and talk about, but I'm not expecting many academic texts on the intricate socio-political subtexts of Mass Effect 2.
That's my admittedly complicated answer to the question of whether video game storylines/scenarios can pose powerful existential questions - you might unsatisfyingly condense it down to 'sometimes, I guess'. I think even the most artistic video games have a hard time truly transcending the threshold of 'high art' because, at some point in almost any game with a serious message to it, that message is encoded in the game's very gameplay, even if it's not as obvious as 'X to save, Y to harvest'. It is a message that you cannot complete the game without at least hearing, even if you aren't thinking about it as hard as perhaps those game developers wanted you to.
This is my caveat to all of this, though - I don't think all art has to ask us deep, probing questions about humanity, society, politics, or history. Even high art does not need to ask us that. When people frame the debate of The Artistic Merit of Video Games, they often use literature, film, or television as a reference point, all of which are art forms that almost universally present a narrative, the presentation of which provides a message of some kind. It seems, on a surface level, that these mediums are the most relevant comparisons to video games, because a very sizeable chunk of video games also present a narrative, and maybe even a message. To imply that something must have a narrative to it in order to qualify as art, though, is to discount work like J. S. Bach's keyboard music or the paintings of Piet Mondrian from a discussion of what is and isn't art. Obviously, then, that definition is not a functioning definition of art. Even film and books are not solely artistic because of their narrative or because of their underlying message. Many of cinemas great auteurs are considered great not solely because of the stories they told, but because of their innovation with finding new ways to tell those stories through the use of cameras, lenses, lights, sets, props, and actors. Alfred Hitchcock told compelling thriller stories, but he also once presented an entire movie in what appeared to be a single unbroken shot. William Faulkner presented the history of a troubled Louisiana family by telling it through the eyes of a mentally-handicapped character with no concept of the passage of time. These are not just compelling stories, but compelling stories that could not have been told to us any other way. In the 'uniqueness of presentation' discussion, video games certainly have a strong horse. I am surely not the first, second, or hundredth person to point out that video games are special because we must actively participate in them. More so than a stage drama with audience participation or a music performance where the crowd claps and sings along, video games cannot and will not engage us without our input. They even prevent us from experiencing them if we aren't skilled enough, a subject that has come more into debate in recent years with the rise in popularity of extremely challenging games like Dark Souls. In that (admittedly somewhat extreme) circumstance, we must learn the language, dynamics, and flow of the game in order to experience it. Any person can listen to Liszt or Chopin and enjoy themselves without understanding the complex music theory that went into the composition of their music, and anyone can watch Mulholland Drive without grasping its experiments with narrative structure, but to play a video game requires a base level of comprehension. Where the bar of that comprehension is set and the ways the video game works to impress that comprehension upon us is an artistic choice on the part of its creator. I've heard it said that people learn best by teaching themselves, and that great teachers excel because they identify well the methods their students learn by, and are better equipped by that to provide the students with the tools they need to teach themselves. Video games are a potent example of this principle - there are some excellent YouTube videos of people breaking down the ways in which video games allow us to teach ourselves how to interact with them. It's through careful attention to this instruction that even punishingly difficult games like Dark Souls can be enjoyed by a large community of fans - I would contrast it with games whose difficulty is based purely in muscle memory or in trial and error.
To delve into this a little further, a commonly discussed element of game design that is hard to put exactly into words is called the feel. My best definition I can give is how well the game gives the player the impression that they are in direct control of their avatar on the screen - a game with good feel can be as effortless to play as it is to move one's own body, and a game with bad feel can completely ruin the immersion, like bad acting or an out-of-tune musician. To me, game feel is another of the more important facets by which a game's artistic value can be judged. Video games are, like I said, unique for their symbiotic relationship with their audience/consumer, and the games that do the best job of immersing their audience do it by feeling the most natural. I think perhaps the ur-example of this connection is with that omnipresent man, Super Mario (who I mentioned above in his previous identity as Jumpman). As his original moniker implies, Mario is a guy who jumps, and he jumps in many different ways (exponentially more since his transition to 3D). This concept is so simple it can be reduced to two words. It works so powerfully and connects to so many people, though, for two reasons: first, that it feels very natural and responsive to do, and second, that it can be done however the individual consumer wants to do it. Mario can jump everywhere all the time, or only as often as he needs to. He can do a regular jump, or a long jump, or a backflip, or kick off of walls. Game Maker's Toolkit's Mark Brown describes this as 'player expression' - I don't know whether he came up with that term or if it was someone else, but it perfectly illustrates that element of video gaming. The ability to bring such a versatile array of experiences from so simple an action demonstrates the technique of video game design that is there just as surely as there is film technique, writing technique, or music technique. Regardless of the message of what is on the screen, we can tell a well-shot film from a poorly-shot one, even if we don't necessarily know the terminology to explain to someone else what the difference is between the two. We can also instantly tell the difference between trying to control Mario and trying to control Superman in Superman 64. While it might seem strange out of context to say that, in this sense, Mario games are an example of an exceedingly technical, artistic accomplishment in video games, that is absolutely a point I will stand by, much the same as Dark Souls or Half-Life 2.
There are other common points of comparison between video games and other mediums in the debate about artistic merit, but I think what my general argument is boils down simply to the fact that video games can do the most for us artistically when they do for us what nothing else can. I think using interactivity in an artistic medium to push the boundaries of narrative is one powerful way that artists can do that, but the very most basic idea of what a video game is - a world you can interact with - presents the widest possibility for artistic expression, narrative be damned. Almost all of the truest artists in video games - whether they are Shigeru Miyamoto creating games that any preschooler or retiree can pick up and play, or whether they're Hideo Kojima crafting an experience that demands a comprehensive understanding of a detailed game world - exceed at what they do not because they ask themselves how they can tell a great story. They exceed at it because they ask themselves what can be done in a video game, and the artistic merit of the medium grows and expands best with the exploration of new ideas. Like blockbuster film franchises and copycat musicians, there's certainly money to be made and entertainment to be had from presenting another angle on something familiar and comfortable, and like those mediums, innovation isn't always world-changing or popular. Any form of art succeeds by connecting in some way with its audience, and it's so exciting to think about the ways we still haven't yet discovered to connect with art - when a good book or film truly engages us, it's nothing short of a revelation, and to me, the surest sign of artistic merit in video games is that I can feel that revelation from them, too.
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