Video Game Theory

"Even Gods dislike the absolute, for it stinks of something larger than themselves." - Sotha Sil. Tamriel is a diverse land of many people, places, and cultures to explore. The Elder Scrolls series has given players and opportunity to set out and do whatever they so desire, whether it be exploring spider-infested caves, cheating a vendor into selling you that potion for like 4 septims, or even just running around and talking to the interesting people and listening to them. Morrowind, Cyrodiil, and Skyrim all gave players a chance to be what they wanted, and it really changed the game of RPG’s. It created the imperssion of that players could create their own characters and not just have to role-play someone elses. But the real question, is what game will be made next? GO ELSWEYR!

So E-Sports have become pretty popular recently, but they’re still not respected in the same way as physical sports. While watching pro gaming is really fun, it’s kind of weird seeing people playing games. I think that to make E-Sports more popular, designers need to learn how to make games interesting to watch, but this can be difficult when thinking about developing strategies and techniques of play in the game. Also, I think that the media is maturing quickly enough so that games will be taken seriously in a few years. This will help the E-Sports market immensely! Although fun to watch, E-Sports isn’t all that it can be, but I think that soon, we’ll figure out how to get it down.

This topic was introduced to me through Extra Credits on YouTube. They're fantastic with their videos and if you're interested in what I post, you'd be more than interested in what they teach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxpW2ltDNow

Lore in video games can be a very powerful tool in making a good story and an immersive world. I’m sure anyone who’s played a lot of Skyrim has read at least one lore book, and anyone who plays fallout knows at least some lore, just by completing the quests. A lot of lore usually predates the time when the game is set, and the developers would be wise to make sure that they make the past stories accessible to the players in an easy and fun way. The Elder Scrolls games are packed with lore, there’s a whole website about it with hundreds, if not thousands of pages containing events that happened outside of the games. But how do the players know about these events if they couldn’t have experienced them in the games? Well Bethesda makes use of the books in the game to tell of the expanded universe, as the Elder Scrolls series is a role-playing game, it encourages people to sit down at the fireplace with a mug of mead and read the lore of Mundus. Fallout lets the player in on the expanded universe through dialogue mostly, or even in the environment. For example, in vault 11, the posters on the walls indicate that the leader was elected, but no one wanted to be leader for some reason. Gives you a good quest to figure out doesn’t it? Irrational Games incorporates the lore ingeniously into Bioshock. While you run around shooting, completing the puzzles and killing anything that stands in your way, you can pick up the Audio Tapes and Voxophones, and they’ll clue you in to not only to the story of the game, but to the events that lead up to the conflicts you’re participating in. Some games use other media to display the lore, like Halo. Halo lore is in a lot of books, and when you want to discover what goes on behind those visors, you’ll have to purchase some books or do some heavy digging online. Some Halo lore can be discovered simply by playing through the campaigns, as the campaigns show a lot of what inhabits the Halo universe. But I think Halo could’ve added more lore into the game itself, and selling individual books isn’t the best way to give background to a story, though it does make more money. Imagine going to the side and talking to a retired ODST and learning about their experiences in the early years of the Human-Covenant War, or sitting down at a computer terminal and looking at files of the history of certain people and events. Do you think that the way Bungie incorporated the lore into Halo is substandard? Of the ways Bioshock, Fallout and Skyrim do it, which way do you most like game lore to be incorporated?

Augmented Reality Games (not to be confused with Alternate Reality Games) are games that include the real world, usually GPS position and location among landmarks, in their game. Some iOS games let you use the camera function on your phone to play the game on a real world backdrop. Ingress and Pokemon GO use the location of the player as a function. Each of them has features that are dependent on where you are, Ingress has portals and war-zones in certain locations, Pokemon GO puts specific Pokemon in places around the real world. Since these games are using the real world but changing it to fit the game, this is Augmented Reality. The recent trends in Google Glass have opened new doors for AgRG’s, since it’s made to be worn all the time and you’re supposed to get immersed into them either way. Imagine sitting on the shore of the pond behind your house, and you see a Blastoise peek above the water. Obviously if you took the glasses off, it wouldn’t be there, but the thought of it is still really cool. Augmentation of reality is awesome but it is also very dangerous. Imagine flying down the highway at 70 mph and seeing a shiny Mew on the side of the road. Half of Pokemon players would be willing to crash their car for that creature, me being one of them. Augmentation and Reality should be companions, and Augmentation can very easily get in the way of reality. Doors are flown open for advertisements here. Imagine if you were playing an AgRG that was an RPG, and you had a quest to kill a monster that only spawned at a McDonalds. Some of us would be likely to order something while we’re there. Advertisers dream of advertising being this easy and effective. Do you think that Augmented Reality Games are a good idea? Do you think that actual reality is a decent place to set a game? What kinds of games would play well like this and what wouldn’t?

We’ve all been on those tf2 servers where everyone on your team is a scout that’s trying to kill that uber-charged heavy, and you want to hit them with a brick. Team Fortress 2 is a prime example of the developers using the weapons and classes to create good counterplay. Counterplay is the concept of when one player could use a certain attack, or in a certain way, then that attack should open up new strategies and options for the other players. For example, the Pyro’s main attack is a spray attack, it shoots out a cone of fire in front of the player. This is good against scouts because it can deal a lot of damage and not take too much aiming. But this attack opens up new strategies to other players. The scouts could be forced to use their pistols, or switch to a different class entirely if they don’t want to be dominated by the Pyro’s flamethrower. The sniper and soldier both have long distance weapons that are perfect for taking out a pyro. This is an example of Perfect Imbalance (we’ll cover that later) as well as counterplay. An example of bad counterplay in a game comes from Halo Reach. I’m sure that if you’ve played your share of the game, you’ve been in games where you’re sniped over and OVER again. This is not fun for the people that the attack is being used upon, and it does not open many strategies other than hiding and sneaking around them. This is bad counterplay. Counterplay is primarily used in RTS’s like DotA or LoL, can you think of any attacks in tf2 with bad counterplay? Or can you think of any great examples of good counterplay in an RTS?

If you’ve ever looked at a game character like the ones above, and just thought, “what the hell is wrong with how they look?”, you’ve probable been exposed to the uncanny valley. The theory about the uncanny valley states that the more human a robot or object looks, the more we will like it, we will find it cuter, but if that robot is almost human, with a few things just… off… about it, it will be in the uncanny valley, you will find it repulsive. That is, until it looks entirely human. Think of R2D2, he has some human characteristics and personality, and he’s cute in an odd sense. Now think of C3PO, he’s more human like, except his movement and his face are just kind of off, so he’s definitely less attractive than R2D2, as well as the actual humans he’s next to. Game designers these days are aiming for much more realistic characters, and I think that they just about reached the end of the uncanny valley. Bethesda has proven to fall victim to it, but Fallout 4 and Skyrim have had characters who actually look okay or even good. To get past the uncanny valley, they made their characters look more realistic and human, but this required sufficient voice acting, natural feeling animations and movement, as well as the overall appearance of the character. These realistic characters are always the most fun to see glitch out. A team could also try to stylize their characters. Why doesn’t Link fall into the uncanny valley in The Ocarina of Time? Because his character isn’t supposed to look realistic, if compared to a regular human, he’d look flawed and disproportional, but in his environment he looks perfectly fitting and it’s very attractive to the players. Do you think that developers have gotten past this? Are there any recent games that still have characters in the uncanny valley? Why does emperor Uriel Septim VII look like a snake in that picture up there?

Bethesda has added a new dialogue system into Fallout 4. Each time you talk to an NPC, you get 4 options of what you wish to say. As well as Black Isle’s previous Fallout games, 3 and New Vegas had a more involved dialogue system, where you knew exactly what you were going to say, you could choose to say much more, and you could make up how your character would say it. Fallout 4′s speech system limits the role-playing aspect of dialogue a lot, but it really can add to the experience for players that aren’t as interested in RPing. Hearing your character is fun, but each of the 4 choices you can choose only has 2 or 3 words that (sometimes) inaccurately represent what your character will actually say if you choose that option. This really breaks some of the immersion that the game is centered around (it is a role-playing game after all). The voice acting in Fallout 4 is far superior to that of some of Bethesda’s other games, but the watered down dialogue options really get in the way of it. I also think that this could really hinder the community’s ability to create quest mods. Bioware put this system into the Mass Effect games and Star Wars: The Old Republic, an MMORPG. People are much less content with this system being used in Fallout than they are in SWTOR, but both are role-playing games with pretty much the same issues created by this system. Why do you think people are so angry about it in Fallout and not as much in SWTOR? Is it only because Fallout has a larger impact on the gaming community?

They do video game analysis and theory on their channel, and for anyone that is interested, you should really check them out!