#wackd

i said i would post this image when i came back, soooooo

hey

I’d say Heaven Sent is the vital clever, pretty center of the best Doctor Who story ever, which happens to be three parts. I can’t really extricate any of the three from each other (though in a pinch, Hell Bent’s the best). But I get what you mean. It doesn’t have the radical thematic stabs the other two do.

wackd

reblogged

your post:

ramblingferret: stephendann: ...

Okay, fine, let’s unpack this a little bit. First off–yes, sure, you debunked my Mario example. Very good. My Pac-Man...

Okay, so. @wackd

First, making a shooter where you’re dropped with guns in a war zone but can’t kill anyone IS making a point about pacifism, whether author wants it or not. It is simply a choice of whether you’re making that point well, or half-assing it for a quick joke. Except because games take months and years to come out, there is no such thing as a ‘quick joke’ in game developent.

Second, both Pac-Man and Punch-Out require you to DO a certain thing. That’s different from requiring you to NOT do a certain thing. Players generally react worse to being forbidden from doing a thing that seems like they could do that. Most notably, when XCOM2, sequel to XCOM introduced turn timers to most missions, forcing you to complete them in a certain time limit, many players reacted extremely negatively to being forced to play in a certain way. Every game has some sort of goals and most have some losing condition - BUT that doesn’t mean ANY losing condition would be fun or engaging.

In game design, there’s a concept called ‘possibility space’ which basically entails all actions player can take within that specific game. It’s important that possibility space be logical and clear to the player. In Punch-Out, you can’t reason with other people because game is about boxing - there is no mechanics for dialogue, so player doesn’t even THINK about dialogue, because it’s literally outside of scope of the game. But here, we talk about a game with enemies and shooting that doesn’t let you shoot enemies, that’s a VERY different situation. Imagine if Punch-Out added a button for talking to opponents that was completely pointless. You could talk to them, but it would do nothing, or perhaps even make enemies instantly knock you out as you’re talking. Would that improve Punch-Out? Does that sound like idea that would be fun for the player? No, it’d be pointless, and frustrating if player would press the button accidentally.

Even then, what we want in our example here is to take ‘shooting enemies’ out of possibility space of this hypothetical game - and I think that “make player restart level” is worst possible way to do that.

The game idea we’re talking about would artificially constrain possibility space in really weird and awkward way - it makes for a good joke, but it’d feel clunky to play. Imagine accidentally grazing an enemy when you were aiming for a bottle that would make a distracting noise, and having to restart a level - does this sound fun? Of course it doesn’t. If you did want to constrain possibility space like that and make player not shoot enemies, there are probably better ways to do that than ‘make player restart level’ which is honestly, a horrible idea that would turn every level into an escort mission, except where the escortee is actively trying to kill you.

I can imagine other ways to remove “shooting the enemies” from player’s possibility space, and probably much less frustrating. Perhaps simply don’t let player shoot when enemies is in the crosshair like some games do with civilians, for starters. Or make enemies invincible. Or both. Restarting the level is a terrible, terrible idea and to me it sounds like a red flag that the game wouldn’t be very fun to play.

And finally - just because people say “I’d play this game!” means nothing. Most people have no idea what makes a good game.

In addition to the pic above - I’ve seen many people say that the right way to do a Superman game would be to have Superman protect Metropolis from threat, and make player invulnerable, but have the CITY have a depleting healthbar you have to protect.

Except, the game like that exists. It’s called Superman Returns, and it sucked, badly, and is actually one of the WORST Superman games. But this line still gets repeated! So as you can see, people saying stuff doesn’t mean squat.

Like, Defenders is pretty good and the characters are served pretty well.

Like, Luke, Jessica, and Matt are written pretty much at their best in their own shows and consistently so. I have only watched the first two episodes of Iron FIst, I’ll get to the rest later today after my Defenders rewatch, but if the first two eps indicate anything they wrote him as the same idiotic self-righteous man-child as his show has so they got that right too.

And I like Matt more here than I did in DD season 2. A friend was able to articulate that without anyone to preach to, the character became substantially less intolerable. 

As my friends and I were chatting, one of them had sort of come to a realization of why Defenders went over so well and why the characters didn’t deteriorate. It seems that it might actually have to do with having decent precedent to work from. Actually it’s probably better for me to just copypaste that bit of convo than explain it. And removed some irrelevant bits. Also kept an amusing bit.

May as well see if the explanation makes sense to anyone else.

Convo credits go to mah bois @wackd with his insight, @thebibliomancer with his amusing asides, @zarekthelordofthefries for asking all the right questions, and @maxwellelvis for knowing too much.

This was specifically said in the context of comparing s1!Joe and s4!Donna. Joe assumed the worst of Donna and confronted her about it. When he realized his suspicions were unfounded and they started talking more calmly, he pointed out that he knew what it was like for people to wrongfully expect the worst from him (or something like that, i don’t have the quote but i think this was the idea?). My comment was just a reminder that Joe more than earned people’s mistrust in him (and it didn’t last that long considering what he did). There’s no common measure between Joe in s1 and Donna in s4 (who is called a villain a lot for some reason but is mostly just unhappily living her life in her own corner?).

So this comment was a tiny tiny TINY critique of a scene I otherwise loved ;)