I hear this a lot, both on the internet and elsewhere. People who say that they can no longer enjoy games and rationalize it as “getting too old” or “growing up”. Note that I’m not talking about a lack of time here– I fully understand that games are time consuming and that, the older we get, the less time we tend to have.
But there seems to be this sort of prevailing idea that games are a toy or mere plaything more than a valid entertainment form.
You don’t grow out of books.
You don’t grow out of movies.
You don’t grow out of watching TV.
You don’t grow out of listening to music.
So why would you grow out of video games? The thought baffles me.
Playtime is for everyone. Even ponies.
Games suck me in just as much these days as they did when I was younger. SMAC, EU3, and Civ IV are a very small sample of games that have all pulled me in and enthralled me just in the last few years alone. And it’s not just “older” games that are doing it– recently, Skyrim has really made me feel like I did back when I was exploring the worlds of, say, Ocarina of Time or early World of Warcraft. The excitement of the games I play lingers well after I turn it off, too, which why this blog exists. I want to talk about games and share my experiences with them. I always have, and even nearing thirty years old now I still do.
Or maybe I’m just unusual. Maybe it is possible to “grow out” of games. Maybe the really interactive nature of games equates them more to something like dance or sports or competitive chess– because you do have to put some amount of work and effort into it, it becomes more relaxing to just not bother. So people for whom it isn’t a priority fade away.
I hope not, though. I don’t ever want to lose what I have with games.
Last night I completed Batman: Arkham City. But this post isn’t about the game itself, but the little statistic of how much of the game you have completed. Because mine is nowhere near 100% even though I’ve seen the ending!
BAC is of course one of those many games where completion of the main quest/storyline in no way means you’ve actually completed the game. Indeed, this is one of the most striking examples of that I’ve seen in a long time; I think I’m at about 40% completed now. There is an absolutely enormous wealth of things to do, from collectables to challenges to side missions. And of course I have varying degrees of enthusiasm for these. The side missions and challenges are pretty much great fun and I imagine I’ll do many if not all of them as I continue to play; the collectables (Specifically the Riddler trophies) rather less so. I have always found collectables to be a very boring and tedious way of extending gameplay. I can’t really bring to mind any games where it has been done well, except perhaps Final Fantasy X because the collectables there (movie spheres) show Auron, Jecht, and Braska.
Hnnnggg Auron
I’ve very rarely 100%’d any games actually. Partly because I’ve got a small core of games I play a lot that aren’t really open to that as a concept; sure you can WC as Haiti on Very Hard but there’s always another campaign to fight in Darkest Hour, you know? And open-world games generally just annoy me with their hidden collectables and so I end up running over innocents or whatever instead!
What about you? Are there games out there you can say you’ve completed 100% of, explored every last nook and cranny, done every sidequest, found every hidden room and item, reached level 99 with every character, whatever it might be? Or are you like me, and more prone to put a game down well before that point?
A blog called Critical Distance provides writing prompts for game bloggers, and I’ve decided to give this one a go (although I can’t promise how successful I’ll be). Here’s the prompt:
Being Other:
Games, like most media, have the ability to let us explore what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. While this experience may only encompass a character’s external circumstances–exploring alien worlds, serving with a military elite, casting spells and swinging broadswords–it’s most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. This official re-launch of the Blogs of the Round Table asks you to talk about a game experience that allowed you to experience being other than you are and how that impacted you–for better or for worse. Conversely, discuss why games haven’t provided this experience for you and why.
I imagine that a lot of responses are talking about gender or race. Which are very valid things to talk about as we approach games critically. However, I’m going to touch on something a little different. I’m going to provide a sequel to my earlier post “A Spreadsheet With a Soul” and talk about what it’s like to be the bad guy in a game. I’m not talking about picking the dark side path in a Bioware RPG. I’m not talking about roleplaying a jerk character in an MMO. Here, let me show you what I’m talking about.
I’ve been on a big Europa Universalis 3 kick lately. Currently I’m playing Portugal and taking over the Americas, just for giggles. Let me tell you how that went down: I sailed over to the new world and found some unclaimed land (denoted as gray on the ingame map.) Some of this land was inhabited by “natives”, which was no big deal, because my infantry could destroy them in a matter of seconds if they chose to fight. I slaughtered several thousands of these natives that way as I slowly began to turn the map from gray to green.
Then I encountered something else. Aside from the nameless “natives”, there were actual native nations on North America. Huron, Iroquois, Cherokee, Shawnee, and others all had little patches of color on the map denoting their territory. If I clicked on their territory I could see the names of their leaders. I could also see that they were eying me rather warily.
At first I decided to be nice. They weren’t bothering me and I was taking land that was rather far from theirs, so I gave them gifts of gold in order to befriend them and then I let them be.
For about, oh, fifty or sixty years or so.
Because that was when my lust for territory had taken me all the way down to them and their little blobs of color on the map were interfering with my lovely solid green. I checked the technology chart– they had nothing compared to me. I clicked on their territory to see what they thought of me. We weren’t friends, by any means, but they “trusted me implicitly”, probably due to decades of peace and the gifts I’d given them.
No matter. I declared war, stormed in, easily killed off their little armies and occupied all their territory. (The “casus belli”– cause for war– that I gave here in order to not take such a hit in various game attributes was that they “owned territory that was rightfully mine”.) They sent me peace treaty after peace treaty– first just begging me to stop and then offering to give up some of their land– and I turned them all down. I wanted nothing but full annexation. I wanted them gone from the map.
See that brown? It was bugging me.
It didn’t take long. First the Iroquois were gone. Then the Huron a few years later. I let Cherokee and Shawnee live for another decade or so (they were more out of my way), at which point they banded together and declared war on me and I retaliated by annexing them. Just as I’d wanted, these cultures were now gone from the map and it was all mine.
Now I know what some of you are probably thinking. That this is an absolutely awful and atrocious game and how could I play it in good conscience and how could anyone find this fun?
Well here, let me tell you something. By the time I quit WoW I had over ten thousand PvP kills on my main character alone, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of NPCs that I’d killed, and I never batted an eye or thought about the implications of it.
I’ve killed hundreds of people in Skyrim and not blinked.
I’ve Planet Bustered away portions of entire continents in SMAC and giggled.
These were all clearly fiction. The enemies were not real. It was all abstract and didn’t matter.
EU3 is different. EU3 is making you recreate events that actually happened (or would have happened, in some crazy world where Portugal took over North America). EU3 has made me stop and think about myself. Sure, I can rationalize every day that I wouldn’t ever do something like this in real life. But you know what? I bet the monarchs back in Europe in the 17th century were seeing it exactly as I was. These other cultures were offending patches of the wrong color on their maps.
Maybe we weren’t so different after all. What a thing to chew on.
It’s just a game, sure. But it’s a game that lets you step into the shoes of history, for good or for ill, and because of that, it’s a very valuable experience.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana
Well, I guess it was bound to happen. Not only have I literally grown up playing video games (and/or using the computer), but carpal tunnel syndrome runs in my family, and it looks like my own luck with staving it off may have run out: this past week or so I’ve had growing discomfort and numbness in my right wrist/thumb, particularly when using the computer. It’s probably something I’ll have to get looked at– in the meantime I’ve given myself a wrist brace, which seems to be helping some, even if it makes typing and such slightly awkward.
I’m still adjusting to the brace (I just got it about a half hour ago), but I figure I should probably do the right thing and give my poor wrist a break and minimize my computer usage for a little while. Well, crap. I was in the middle of colonizing Canada as Portugal in my latest EU3 game, too.
My face, upon realizing the implications of all of this.
Oh, who are we kidding? I’ll probably keep playing anyway, albeit a little less. And on the plus side I still seem to be able to comfortably hold a 360 controller with no issues, which means maybe I can actually finish Skyrim (and poke around with Mirror’s Edge which I’ve recently acquired.)
Has anyone else had this problem? What are your tips for dealing with it– especially as a gamer?
As you’re no doubt aware by now, many sites around the Internet today are engaged in a protest against the SOPA and PIPA bills currently within the labyrinthine depths of the US Congress. Though we can do no more than add our voice to this overwhelming, global cry of outrage, that is what we are now doing.
Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act would fall desperately short of their stated objectives – the darker side of the Internet is notoriously resilient and difficult to control, after all – but it would give corporations enormous powers to target any and everything they see as a threat to their profit margins. As writers Pike and myself are obviously sympathetic to the notion of being able to protect and control what one produces – but we also wouldn’t start suing preteens for sharing our books. This bill, like so many other efforts to control something as vast, free, and amazing as the Internet, is not going to help stop piracy – what it will do is create an unprecedented tool for the violation of the rights to free speech, to privacy, to free congregation, and threatens to erase one of the Internet’s most central and precious functions, which is the lack of borders and ability to talk to anyone else on Earth regardless of all considerations except their literal, physical access to the Internet.
It was acceptable back in 1518, maybe!
This very blog could easily be at risk. That is how insane these bills are. We are writing about what are copyrighted materials, nevermind when we use a picture from MLP:FIM or embed a YouTube video which contains a few seconds of a copyrighted song. Though we both love writing this blog there are far more severe ramifications – still, the fact that a fairly dinky little blog that mostly talks about strategy videogames and posts fanart of My Little Pony could be endangered shows just how obscenely far-reaching and wide-ranging these two bills are. So if you love the Internet, whether it’s watching cats being silly, reading about how I most recently got foiled by Pike, using Google or Wikipedia, or anything else you can imagine, please consider taking the time to write to your representative asking them to oppose these dangerous, unconstitutional pieces of legislation.
And remember, America is not the first or only country considering laws like this, and the US as the motherland of the Internet makes many foreign sites entirely vulnerable to these laws anyway. If you are not American, like me, it’s still something to be worried about. And the beauty of the Internet is that we can all contribute to the debate and help raise awareness even if we can’t take formal action like voting in an American election.
My dear co-blogger and better half Pike and myself are currently playing a game of Civilization IV. It’s a tech race game, no wars or anything, and she very definitively has the advantage, she has more cities than more, better land, more tech, and more than double my score.
Clearly I need to do something to catch up. So why – in a game with no barbarians – did I build the Great Wall, a wonder whose primary purpose is to stop barbarians getting inside your borders? The secondary purpose, of course! Espionage. See, the Great Wall is one of the few wonders in the game which contributes to the creation of Great Spies, who don’t immediately seem as useful as say a Great Scientist (Who can one-shot a tech) or a Great Engineer (Who can one-shot a wonder), but who really massively boost your espionage. And that’s my plan here. She won’t be able to keep up with my espionage income once I get a GS or two, and then I shall be able to quite merrily run around her obscenely large Russian empire causing all sorts of trouble, like sabotaging buildings, stealing tech, and poisoning her cities.
Rarity only helps put paid to that dreadful Russian fashion, of course.
It shall be glorious. I have no idea whether she remembers that the Great Wall helps with spies, but I sincerely hope not because things are going to get trolly very soon. Also as long as she doesn’t read this post before one gets born. That would be unfortunate. Hubristic, even! But a risk I shall take for our beloved readers, as I leave you with this question;
Do you have any examples of games where you’ve come up with some cunning plan? Perhaps one that does not at first glance seem at all rational? How did they work out for you?
~~
IMPORTANT EDITORS’ NOTE FROM PIKE: Although I didn’t see this post until some time later, I saw what he was up to on the espionage graph and cranked my own espionage up to 80%, effectively foiling his plan. Yeah, it was pretty great.
SteamQuest is a series based around Pike’s quest to play all the games she has on Steam. Which is a lot. Her definition of “play”, here, is at least one hour for smaller games and at least three hours for more substantial ones. Feel free to follow along!
Ben There, Dan That! Developer: Size Five Games Genres: Indie, Point-And-Click Adventure Website: http://www.sizefivegames.com/games/ben-there-dan-that/ – and the Steam Link Time Spent by Pike: 62 minutes – unfinished
Today’s SteamQuest entry was actually going to be about Alpha Protocol, but as it turns out my computer doesn’t want to run it. So for the time being I’m stuck running games that take much lower system requirements. Hopefully I can patch up my computer eventually and then I can go back and play the newer, fancier stuff, but until then I’m plucking random indie and/or older games off of my list. Ben There, Dan That! is one of them.
I’ll come right out and admit it: I’m not a big Point & Click Adventure game player. This isn’t because I have something against them, but I just have very, very little experience with them. It’s one of those genres that I don’t know very much about just because I’m so inexperienced with the games in said genre.
This is a quintessential adventure game, though. You click stuff. You pick stuff up. You solve puzzles by combining stuff. That’s basically how the game works. It’s not a difficult mechanic, but in this game it’s well-executed. Once you get the hang of how things work it’s very intuitive, and some of the puzzles will leave you feeling very clever indeed.
The devs are clearly fond of Sam & Max and Monkey Island (in-jokes and homages abound) and so this is an adventure in a bizarre world and off-the-wall humor abounds. Should you choose to examine a light switch in the bathroom, one of the characters goes into a very detailed monologue about said light switch, for example. The characters also poke unabashed fun at themselves (they’re based off of the devs) and at prior games they’ve made. Not gonna lie, the humor had me laughing to myself on more than one occasion. The game is also super-British, so one of my early quests was to rig up an “aerial for a knackered telly”. Yeah, it took almost as long for me to figure out what they wanted me to do as it did to solve the puzzle itself. Fortunately I can always use Mister Adequate as a translator if things get dire.
Pic related.
There’s not really much else to say about this game except that it was considerably more interesting than I initially thought it would be and it’s probably worth a look for point-and-click fans, especially since you can get both this game and its sequel in a package for $5. I think I’ll be diving back into this at some point in the future when I’m not in a rush to get a blog post out before work. Supposedly the storyline involves Nazi dinosaurs or something, and that’s clearly worth a closer look.
Moments later I was abducted by the aliens outside the window and taken aboard their spaceship. ...no, really. That's in the game.
Yesterday I beat Final Fantasy 2, which means I’ve got two down in my quest to play all the major Final Fantasy games (barring the MMOs) in order. This is one of the games I haven’t played before, so it was all completely new to me. It was also a game that a lot of people gave me advance warning on because it’s so polarizing. Apparently FF2 is the game that will make or break a planned Final Fantasy marathon.
Well, I’m pleased to report that I actually quite enjoyed this game. It did have a couple of unconventional ideas and mechanics, which made the first hour or two probably the most difficult to get through, but once I got past that it was smooth sailing. I found this to be an immensely enjoyable RPG with a lot to offer in terms of being able to customize your party to fit your playstyle.
Did someone say "party"?
The last couple of dungeons– the Jade Portal and Pandemonium Castle– were deliciously difficult and had me worried that I was going to run out of the 99 ethers I’d brought along with me (not to mention all of the potions.) Every random encounter felt like a mini-boss. Running into a group of Abyss Worms was always utterly terrifying and yet so thoroughly delicious to struggle against. It was wonderful. And due to the unique way in which you “level” your characters in this game, I really felt like the final boss fight was the moment that I’d been training for this whole time. I loved it.
All in all I had an awful lot of fun with this game and I really do recommend pushing yourself through the first couple of hours and warming up to the playstyle if you’re looking for a solid and challenging oldschool RPG.
Now then: on to Final Fantasy 3! This is another game I haven’t played, so I’m excited to dig into this one!
It’s the motto of Dwarf Fortress: Losing is Fun. And it’s one you need to take to heart with that game, because until you get the hang of it (And even after you do) you’re going to lose, a lot. But that’s not quite what I’m aiming at here. In conventional games you may often die a lot as well, but you’ll come back at the last checkpoint or save and carry on.
What I am thinking of, however, is something fairly unique to strategy gaming, which is to say, losses that don’t end the game, but rather that are just a part of the game, a thing you endure, carry on from, and ultimately recover from.
But does that happen? See, in a ‘regular’ game like, say, Halo, when you die you just come back from it. You try again. You succeed, or not, and that’s that. In a game like DF you may lose a lot of work, but in these cases the loss is indeed part of the fun. It comes about because of a silly mistake, or because of hubris, or because you just got bored and wanted to watch the world burn. But in a strategy game losses are different.
Decisions, decisions
In the real world of course no country is in permanent ascendance. Not even Rome enjoyed uninterrupted growth, and Rome eventually fell, as all powers do. So a strategy game must surely account for this as well. Yet in my experience, when you lose a city in Civilization or are forced to cede provinces in Europa Universalis III, it doesn’t feel good. It does’t feel like it’s part of the proper flow of the game. In a strategy game you do expect to be in permanent ascendance, and to not be is irritating and may well turn one off playing. I recall reading an interview with Sid Meier years ago where he said his original intention with Civ had been for your civ to go through periods of contraction and decline, but he found it was far from enjoyable to have it work like that.
Partly I think this is a case of momentum. In a strategy game, when you gain something, that something goes towards helping your empire grow. Overextension and the like are rarely simulated, and almost never simulated well, and in fact when that is attempted (As in the Magna Mundi mod for EU3) it often comes off as very arbitrary and pointlessly constricting.
How about you? Am I alone here, or do others feel the same and dislike accepting losses? Are there examples of games which do this well, and don’t make it feel arbitrary or unfair?
Firaxis – that of Civilization fame – has just announced that they are remaking X-Com and that it’s going to be a turn-based strategy, like the original. Excuse me while I post my face:
And now, Mister Adequate and myself shall post our thoughts on this:
Pike’s Thoughts:
There’s a lot that could go wrong here but there’s also a lot that could go right. The easy way out would be to say to just make X-Com but give it a graphical and UI facelift, but we could even improve upon that. RPS discusses this at length in this article. Mostly what I think is vital to me is that they don’t lose any of that feeling of being terrified between turns as you hear noises and “hidden movement.” Like old Hitchcock movies, X-Com largely works not because what it shows you, but because of what it doesn’t show you. I hope that, in the whirlwind of fancy graphics and whatnot, Firaxis doesn’t lose sight of this.
This is definitely going to be an interesting one to watch– since we don’t have any major details yet, it’s definitely too early to say whether or not this is all going to work, but as it stands now I’m rather cautiously optimistic. Firaxis isn’t perfect by any means, but if we’re going to put X-Com in the hands of a major studio I’m glad they’re the ones getting it.
Mister Adequate’s Thoughts:
Given that we know very little about the thing at this point, Pike has already covered most of the major points that could be made right now, and I echo everything she said. What I will add is that I am also cautiously optimistic if for no other reason than the fact that XCOM – the shooter that is – is already on the way. There’s nothing to be gained by trying to capitalize on the action market, 2K would be competing against themselves, and a studio like Firaxis is never going to have an easy time going up against 2K Marin in the shooter domain, but the strategy side of things is, Xenonauts aside, wide open.
There is an enormous wealth of ideas about what a new XCOM ought to be floating around out there, and I hope Firaxis have been carefully and continue to carefully read and think about them, and take them on board where it seems appropriate. We’re a rabidly obsessed, hard to please fanbase, but give us what we want and we will reward you with kingly sums.
Another, and absolutely vital, aspect here is modding capability. People have done some impressive things with the original X-Com despite the thing not being remotely modder-friendly, but look at the mod scene for Civ IV and imagine that transposed into XCOM.
