the overthinker

But there’s more harm in fighting out-of-context clips with out-of-context clips than just legitimizing the anti-video game crowd’s reductive tactics — it also lends credence to the idea that depictions of fictional violence are inherently bad and that the gaming community should minimize them to retain a good public image.

Violence exists in every art form on the planet — from movies to books to ancient pottery — because it can be an interesting and valuable subject to explore. Violence does have a place in video games. The way to defend that isn’t to shy away from it. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl didn’t survive its obscenity trial in the ‘50s off the existence of its less lewd images, but off the merit of its vulgarity. But if our gut reaction is to keep on insisting that games are more than the x-ray killcams, headshots, and stylish executions the White House reel depicts, maybe it’s because we’re afraid to admit that video games’ “exploration” of violence kind of sucks.

“I wasn’t a big fan of the way she was marketed then,” says Rhianna Pratchett, lead writer on 2013’s Tomb Raider, 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider and contemporaneous comics. “It wasn’t so much the sexualisation aspect that bothered me – it was pretty ubiquitous in the 90s – but the way she was being solely aimed towards male gamers.” However, Pratchett says, “that method of advertising undeniably worked in helping Lara become a household name.”

Tomb Raider’s popularity was explosive: the first two games sold more than 13m copies and Croft became an international superstar. Her emergence coincided with the crossover of video games into mainstream culture; this was when Sony was marketing the first PlayStation at nightclubs.

Zora is one of the two main characters in our second game, In the Valley of Gods. Quite a few people remarked on Zora’s character design, in particular her hair, when they saw our announcement trailer. Indeed, creating Zora’s hair is a challenging problem for intertwined technical and cultural reasons. I would like to talk about our explorations and aspirations so far, and why it’s important to us we get it right by the time we ship.

In 2015, Evan Narcisse wrote an important essay on natural hair and blackness in video games. You should read it. It was the first time I’ve really thought critically about hair and representation in video games, and the yearning in the piece struck me.

[...]

So when I first saw the character design for Zora, I had an understanding of what task lays before us as a team. None of us has Type 4 hair, characterized by tight coils and common among black women. In fact, none of us have even made video game hair before, but we are committed to giving Zora the hair she loves, the way she chooses to wear it, with all the care and effort we can.

But Warcraft 3’s historical significance isn’t why people love it, talk about it, and flip metaphorical tables when it is not given the Remastered HD Collector’s Special Edition treatment. It’s also one of the all-time great single-player campaigns in history. Where the earlier Blizzard games told their stories via cutscenes and in-game dialogue to which you were just a spectator, Warcraft 3 had most of its key events unfold inside of the missions themselves, and found ways of forcing the player to participate in them. It was a game in which your original hero lost his soul and, by the time you finished playing his story, you might feel like you’d traded a piece of yours as well.

[...]

“The Culling” is where that narrative goes off the rails. Arthas arrives at a major city, attempting to stop the delivery of the tainted food that is spreading the plague. He finds his friend Jaina and mentor Uther waiting for him and, as he explains what is happening, he realizes that the plague has already hit the city. In order to keep the plague from spreading further, he says, they have to purge the city and exterminate its infected population before they all turn.

Without combat, Subnautica ends up feeling like a watered-down (hahaha) stealth game. Because there's so much repeated traversal across the world and no practical way to disable the strongest enemies, you have to be able to sneak past most of them without much trouble. Like most other games, the best tactic is to do what speedrunners do: just move past your enemy and ignore them, and you can easily leave their "aggro" radius before they catch up to you. [...] Now, take all these factors, and then also let the player basically fly around and change their height at will. After the initial shock of a weird creature encounter wears off, every hostile monster becomes a nuisance instead of a perpetually engaging design element. Maybe that's just the curse of stealth games? So your real enemy is the land itself. Navigation becomes its own form of combat that threatens to kill you. Subnautica ends up being even more cruel than The Long Dark, and never provides you with any in-game world map nor any mapping mechanisms. This omission helps exploration feel genuinely dangerous and confusing, and also lets the devs sidestep the problem of legibly mapping a huge 3D terrain for player UI, but this decision has further repercussions for navigation and level design. Caves become mini-bosses; deep trenches become mega-bosses.

Part of what’s exciting about interactive narrative is that we’re still figuring out the structures, and we keep finding new challenges to those structures. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a sort of anthology of stories, and individual vignettes are very short. There’s a limited number of vignettes that connect to each other, but they’re largely self-contained stories, and ideally no longer than 400 words each.

This tiny size is demanding in various ways. You have to involve the player character somehow, itself a challenge in this game — WTWTLW features a wandering cypher as a viewpoint character. In most vignettes, this has happened halfway through the first paragraph. Vignettes usually end just after barely reaching a conclusion, or even a suggestion of a conclusion; there’s no room for tying up loose ends at all. There’s a very delicate balance of scene-setting against depth and flavor.

It’s a lot like flash fiction, and Keythe Farley’s brilliant narration does a lot of work making those moments linger and land properly.

In Purrfect Date, you take on the role of a researcher arriving on Cat Island to assist a mysterious scientist named Professor Pawpur. Your job is to track and register the feline inhabitants, using a handy device named the Cat-A-Log (“For the last two years, my life has basically been cat puns,” says Ruby). On the first night, however, a cat-scratch infects you with a disease that will slowly transform you into a cat unless you discover the antidote. You can now converse with the friendlier felines of the isle, but with those foreign hormones racing through your bloodstream, you also find that you can date them.

Purrfect Date is sweet, funny and engaging. The romance aspect is innocent and friendly rather than physical, the six dateable cats quickly becoming fluffy symbols for lots of romantic traits and tropes. It’s a playful expression of something that’s been happening in game development since free tools and digital stores started democratising the medium several years ago: creators subverting video game conventions to explore personal, emotional and moral themes, using their own experiences as inspiration.

For Ruby and Oliver, it’s also subtly autobiographical. “This game is basically our relationship,” says Ruby. “There’s so much of our personalities in there – lots of jokes and loving insults. The sphynx cat is quite helpless in her vanity. She is very much me on a bad day … The game is an expression of our love for each other.”

Isaac, in other words, has godlike powers but is deeply annoying. I am certain he has been deliberately designed to be this way, which is a quiet masterstroke.

One of the smaller things I really dig about Into The Breach is how the unseen civilians greet the arrival of your mechs with awe, and you then proceed to play in stoic near-silence: the epitome of a selfless hero. Isaac’s whingeing undermines that, in a way that reminds me uncomfortably of Judge Dredd having to trek through the Cursed Earth with Rob bloody Schneider in tow.

The desire to build walls, both literal and ideological, between ourselves and the rest of the world might offer temporary solace, but ultimately contributes to the kinds of ruinous and dystopian outcomes evidenced in apocalyptic settings like Metro 2033. The legacy of the suburbs of post-war America is dilapidated cities, sucked dry of resources and promise, ringed by better-off communities, and near-unlivable for working class people. But our fates remain intertwined: if, like the average white suburbanite, you rarely see people who are different from you, if your only image of the worse-off comes from conservative news organizations or passed-down stereotype, the odds that you’ll ever work together toward a positive future are close to zero. The chances you’ll vote against social programs that could help you, out of fear that the undeserving “other” might also benefit, are near certain.

The stations of the metro map out in similar ways to the historically divided geography of America’s big cities. Just as the all-white holdouts of these cities proved to be, the majority of Metro 2033’s stations are deeply unfriendly to outsiders. And as was commonly the case with white neighborhoods, the mere act of trespassing in many stations invites violence.

What Went Wrong?

I think I overcompensated in trying to keep the story short; I didn’t want to overload the reader with too many characters or misdirections but the consensus was that the twist and antagonist were far too obvious. On balance I probably could’ve kept some mystery without losing people.

Another sacrifice I made for clarity was to make the narrator, Abby, a bit thin on characterization. I really grew to love the protagonist in Stone Harbor and many readers did too. I missed that feeling while writing Abby and in retrospect I should’ve taken more time to develop her character. I didn’t care as deeply for her as I should’ve and I think that came through in the writing.

Lastly, in the research for this project I found myself inspired by these early utopians—no matter how ill-conceived their experiments were, these were people who genuinely believed in building the future they wanted to see. I think I could’ve injected more of that hopeful optimism into the antagonist and made [redacted to remove a mild spoiler] a richer and more sympathetic character.

As a new player, this solution looked very neat to me. Everything you make in Opus is tremendously satisfying to watch, so even if you’re only muddling through the game you get to feel smart. But there’s also enormous scope for improvement, in three different directions.

It could be cheaper. [...] This solution involves 70g worth of gear. The cheapest one I’ve designed since only costs 40g.

It could be smaller. Not by much, this is the metric I scored best on. [...]

And my solution could be faster. It could be a lot faster. My first solution took 63 cycles, then my friend Alex beat me with 53, so I made that one which only takes 45. I was pretty pleased with myself. Until the leaderboards told me my friend Jeep had done it in 24. Twenty-four?! You can do this almost twice as fast as my fast solution? Opus Magnum lets you see your friends scores but doesn’t show you their solutions, and I’m actually glad. I wanted to figure this out for myself.

So I wanted to get the development builds in front of people quickly... and I didn't need that many participants. We already had nearly 5,000 Kickstarter backers. I knew most backers would be happy to leave the game in the oven for the next eight months,  but at a conservative estimate we'd probably get 400-500 beta testers. That would be plenty, right? For a single-player game, you don't get 10x better feedback at thousands rather than hundreds of players. You do get a lot more comments and bug reports to process.

But people burn out, and also people become veterans. If 500 people beta-test your game when the first dev build hits, a good many of them will stop playing after the second or third (especially if early builds are buggy - which they will be if you're going in early). And a lot of others will be very familiar with the game, and will stop seeing it as new people will. You'll still get useful feedback, but you can't use them to tune your early game experience, which is the most important five minutes of the game. (This is one of the things I learnt the hard way on Sunless Sea.)

They toyed with the game being about protecting a single city which would evolve over time, with players having to build structures and repair them when they were damaged, making them matter because they’d just taken a chunk of resources to build them up.

“That didn’t feel very good,” says Ma.

“Yeah, it still didn’t come together in a way we liked,” adds Davis.

But focusing enemies’ attentions on the city did tie together well with the core mechanic that was steadily evolving for the game, namely, the idea that players always know where the enemy are attacking next so each turn they have a chance to disrupt them before they unleash havoc. But when the mechs were the only target, they found that the threatened havoc was trivial, because all the mechs needed to do was to walk away.

On last Friday’s podcast, we talked about why there hadn’t been any coverage of Kingdom Come: Deliverance on Waypoint. If you didn’t get a chance to listen, we had reservations about using our own platform to legitimize a game whose creative director supported (and continued to defend) GamerGate. Kingdom Come has reportedly sold more than a million copies, meaning the game hasn’t had much trouble finding itself an enormous audience.

If we were chasing every click possible, it would have made sense to cover Kingdom Come, but we didn’t. Which we choose to highlight at Waypoint is its own statement. That’s not to say we won’t publish anything about Kingdom Come in the future, if we find a way to cover it that wouldn’t betray what Waypoint represents, but for now, our attention goes elsewhere.

It would be valid to ask “Hey, aren’t you just chest-beating and patting yourself on the back for something you could have quietly done without coming across as braggadocios?”

It’s a tale as old as time, really. Girl meets girl. Girl directs all the romance options in the dialogue tree at girl. Girl goes on date with girl to local bar and eats four bowls of chips and dip. Girl takes girl home. Girl makes out with girl on the sofa right in front of a single potato...?

Right, so one of us has somehow placed a potato on the living room floor just in front of the television. We could spend time trying to assign potato culpability or we could just shrug and decide this is our lucky make out potato and leave it there to bless our relationship.

The make out potato plan works and the woman agrees to become my girlfriend. This level of commitment means I should learn her name. It is Katrina. Please do not ask me her last name.

‘Nine one-off powers’ was not really broken or flawed in any particular way. You could certainly make a game that took this idea to its limits. You could make several. The idea was not the problem.

The problem was that I did not take a good, hard look at the focal point, this unchanging pivot in my design, to decide whether or not I cared about it enough to put it at the center. If you’re solving problems, best to make sure you’re trying to solve the right problems for the right reasons.

Look at everything you’re fighting for, everything you’re unwilling to change, and make sure it’s worth it.

The dice even switch back to the sevens configuration, a move that Eerkens suggests may have something to do with a growing sense that dice must be balanced, both physically and conceptually. (Lest you think one of these orientations is somehow the default, in an earlier experiment, the researchers asked schoolchildren to number the sides of paper cubes, and showed that neither primes nor sevens was intuitive. Instead, the kids wrote one on one face, turned the cube 90 degrees to write two on the next face, and so on, resulting in a configuration the researchers call turned.)

All these changes in dice come about, says Eerkens, “as different astronomers are coming up with new ideas about the world, and mathematicians are starting to understand numbers and probability.” Which came first: Did people begin to intuitively understand what true chance felt like, and adjusted dice accordingly, or did it trickle out from what would eventually become known as the scientific community? It isn’t clear, but to Eerkens, the story told by the dice is of a rising awareness of randomness.