clyde

I have a hard time separating permadeath from randomly generated levels. I don't enjoy permadeath if I have to play the level over again. But when the levels are randomly generated, I enjoy permadeath because I enjoy experiencing a rapid and significant leveling up of abilities during that single play-session rather than through a 30 hour game that takes me a month. In Spelunky, I start out with a few hearts, a few ropes and a few bombs. Being in that beginner's state, I have a different kind of experience than if I have plenty of resources. A lot of games with 30 hour campaigns never allow you to return to that beginner's state in the natural course of the game. You earn abilities then always have them, but the beginner's state provides me with a different and valuable perspective of the game world. I approach situations differently when I have very little. Roguelikes let me experience the difference between having very little and having a lot, everytime I play. When I play this type of game, my objective is usually to see how far I can get.

I love playing Spelunky over and over again. It has some permanent unlocks which I appreciate, but never use the shortcuts I've unlocked. I wouldn't like Spelunky if the levels and loot were not randomly generated though. For me, it's very enjoyable to play through the first four levels, feeling like I've done an amazing job at accumulated hearts and great loot. Then I get to a jungle level and the caption says "It's dark, I can't see." And I'm like. . . ."no, please no." I really enjoy games in which I have all the cards stacked in my favor and then one bad thing leads to another until I lose it all. I have to feel like it was my fault though. In your original post, you talk about permadeath making your playtime seem pointless. I feel a need to point out that you have made progress, it's just not saved on your hard drive. You now have experience and a better idea of what to expect. Roguelikes allow players to experiment with different builds and different priorities and get quick feedback. The progress is your knowledge and skill as a player. Last night I was playing Dirt 3. While it's not a roguelike, I can get into the same core loop. Usually when I play racing games, I just play the same course over and over for about 30 minutes. It's about being able to not only take a corner at just the right angle and speed, but being able to do that for four corners in a row. And then running into a tree on the fifth turn and starting over. Pinball has the same appeal for me. I actually am starting to feel a disdain for games where I do get progress saved to the hard drive. I'm stuck in Skyrim because I've forgotten what I was doing, or how to use any of my spells, but I don't want to start over because I get bored doing the missions a second time.

After reading that, I'm reminded that Mount&Blade has some of these political elements. I'm pretty sure that you can talk to generals and gain their support by doing them favors and talking shit about the generals they don't like. I'm not very good at it though so, I never got anywhere with that.

This conversation has encouraged me to play Fate of the World again. Whew. That game is so stressful.

I love how both of the console threads have come to the point where they are talking about PCs

Walking Dead definitely has a Lord of the Flies feel to it. I haven't figured out what it is I want yet, so I haven't come close to describing an effective game mechanic. Do I want a game to make me feel politically relevant? Or do I want a game to teach me how to be politically relevant? I'm not sure. Ideally, a game would make me feel like I have political relevance at the beginning so that I get a taste of success. Then through the course of the game, I'm introduced to systems that require compromise, but with an approachable pace that will encourage me. By the end, I'd like to have a realistic perspective of what activism is actually capable of and the techniques that make things happen. Games usually imply that political differences are solved by shooting down helicopters, I'd prefer to distance myself from that idea. I don't have a realistic concept of how public opinion changes, so it's hard to brain-storm possible game mechanics. Maybe some sort of asynchronous multiplayer game where you play as Frank Luntz? You receive a list of instructions that you then have to word in such a way that a group of players will firstly decide to follow your instructions (in competition with another player who is in your same position, who has described the instructions in their own way) and then actually perform them accurately. Grading the group's accuracy would be necessary to make sure that the player doesn't just write "Bacon!" and get more clicks. But see. Can you imagine feeling like you are stopping a war of aggression with mechanics like that? I would just feel like a power-hungry weasel. It's a really interesting problem.

Is there a lot of persuasion in Shin Megami Tensei?

After my first game of Expeditions: Conquistador reached a place where my personal version of events necessitated a narrative end for my character, I've decided to start a new game. This will obviously be spoiler heavy as many of the journal entries will include main story mission events from the game. I'm not sure if this is the best place to do these journal entries, but I don't feel like figuring out a better place unless the moderators ask me to. Feel free to comment, I'm not trying to keep this thread pure or anything. But unless you write a message from Spain for Gustav (in character), he will not write back. And now, straight from 1518, Gustav Abalone:

Day 9: As we made our way back to Santo Domingo, On the first day of travel, nothing anomalous occured. But this morning, Bernardo was suddenly swallowed by the ground beneath him as we walked along the road. Adriana Cervera, seeing her companion disappear, acted quickly without fear, but was soon suffering from the same fearful circumstance. The rest of the party quickly gathered some rope from the cart and we rescued them from the deadly mire. Bernardo took some soil into his mouth and is not in the best of health after the incident. We traveled on. When we got back to Santo Domingo I went to the Governor to repossess our ship. He gave us 1000 valuables in payment for dealing with the pagans, but began speaking of another favor when I demanded our ship be returned to us. When I repeated my demands, he exploded in anger, threatening to imprison me if I did not do his deeds. If Rita had accompanied me into the mansion, then I may have signaled her to shoot. It is probably best that she did not come with me, but instead traded some of our medicinal surplus for additional rations in the market. I must bide my time with the Governor, his requests may lead me to God's will, unbeknownst to the Governor's petty needs.He told me of two rebel groups, one in the North and one in the West. He says that the one in the West is led by a man named Esteban Gallegos. Supposedly he is a notorious brawler back in Spain. I've never heard of him. Because Sister Blanca Alegria's church is in the North, I told the Governor that we would investigate and secure that situation first. He told me to contact Capitan Leandra Vizcaino in San Tiago. Before the day was out, we had made some way on the road going North to San Tiago. Bernardo is so bad off from this morning's accident that he will not be able to watch guard over the camp, Teresa Sanchez is taking care of him tonight. She does not think it will be long until he is back to normal.

Day 7: We reached the pyramid when the sun was at it's peak. There they were, savages in their nakedness, dancing about a fire. I approached them with my weapon sheathed, armed only with the armor of our Lord God. I announced that I had come to them to show them the way to everlasting life. They looked at me with confusion until Isabela stepped forward to translate my words into their primitive tongue. A female chieftain presented herself and asked what business we had with her tribe. Like Moses coming off of the mountain, I condemned their wicked ways and told them that they must come to the Lord. The chieftain became a demon of anger! She spat gibberish at me aggressively once she understood my demands. The rest of the tribe watched like restless sheep, paralyzed in fear. Their leader had brought them into this confusion of sin. I gave the signal to Rita to shoot the chieftain. When the smoke cleared, it was as if the remaining members of the tribe saw death for the first time. I shouted to them "This is where your ungodly ways will lead you, it is through the name of Jesus Christ alone that you can achieve everlasting life, and fear death no more." I told them to disperse from their cursed temple and to share with the others, the power of our Christian God. They took the chieftains body and left into the jungle. I think things went well. We headed back to Santo Domingo. It was growing late before we got back to the road so we have set up camp. Tomorrow, I expect to get my ship back from the governor.

My wife is learning Korean and I'm trying to help. I'm considering ordering a kid's learning DS game from Korea or something. I haven't looked at what is available yet, but I'm sure you get the idea. Have any of you had success in learning a foreign language with the help of a video game and its objective-based systems? Or have you tried, only to discover unseen obstacles?

Enjoyed it.

Well, to make it apply to the crowd, you could get a weekly incident report. Everytime someone gets shived in the yard, it makes a note. After a while you start to see a pattern and fundamental attribution error falls away. You can then hire the internal investigator or interview a variety of individual prisoners who were involved in the incidents that seem to occur in the same place. You notice that most of the causality chains involve not being able to get through a door or a toilet or something. Then you as a player can change the architecture to influence behavior of the crowd. And it's because you had feedback from various scopes.

I've never played a Metal Gear game and that trailer during the conference was so surreal. Americans in Afghanistan, Japanese anime style. I loved the bikini sniper and the child mystic with the tooth necklace.

I'm sure they will have some sort of ranking system. That would be cool if the difficultly settings described how long your competition has played the game. So then when I choose "2 hours", i'll race against clones of players at their 2 hour mark. I'm hoping that there'll be an option to choose driveatars by name if you want. So for instance I could play against all my friends who have played the game a year a go, but who are finished with the game and never play it anymore. Or I could play against a full roster of my clones. Shoot, I can imagine getting some enertainment out of setting up a race between my driveatar and a friend's driveatar, and then us being in chat as if we were at a horse race.

What are some comparable 2D indie games whose aesthetic you feel is more innovative and interesting?

Is anyone else fascinated by the promises of the "driveatar" in the Forza 5 demo? Programing A.I. by uploading player behavior sounds like the future to me. If it's implimented in other genres it could be really interesting, especially if griefers realize that they can make the A.I. opponents in other people's games tea-bag and spin in circles while looking at the sky.

Hearing Paradox's CEO being like "If my boy wasn't holding me back, I'd make a Cargo MMO!" was really entertaining. Dude sounds hardcore.

I've heard of someone doing this, only it wasn't a boxing glove, it was anthrax. And it wasn't funny, it was terrorism. This is an attempt a humor. I'm not offended by your punching box idea, but at the same time, I'm not giving you my mailing address.

Imagine if in Prison Architect you could hire some sort of Internal Affairs agent to investigate events such as prisoner murders, guard abuse, or riots. If that agent could then use a game-log to create a report that consists of a chain of causality, then the individual traits and preferences of the prisoners could be shown to have purpose. If i got a report back that a riot started because two prisoners got in a fight over a smuggled cigarette and they had some sort of gang alliances, that would imply meaning to the simulation. I think this is the type of thing these games need. Spacebase DF-9 was inspired with their social app attempt, but ultimately it didn't seem to actually reflect much from the simulations details. I suspect that the information may have to be shown in a causality chain in order to have meaning to the player (unless you want to depend on apophenia and the player's imagination).

Rodi, it's things like this that make me feel like I'm in the right place.

I enjoy the idea of tuning games to evoke more apophenia. Tarot cards are one of the best examples of this in my opinion. I think that tarot is especially effective for a few reasons. First of all, its got a great amount of hype that makes the player very keen on interpretation. The "hair-complexity" that the author recommends is the details, desires, and concerns of the player's own life. Many forms of divination do this, especially the ones that still have a mystique and respect surrounding them. Another thing tarot does well is that it starts with "story-rich" archtypes that can be infered with very little knowledge. This is more true for the major arcana, but the story-richness of that subset of the deck is so concentrated with concepts like "secrets" and "lovers", that the player ends up being invested enough by seeing some of those cards that they are willing to look in a book to find out what the 3 of swords reversed means. The tarot is pretty much the epitome of what the author is talking about IMO. One option that i don't see the author considering is just giving the player a path to see the complexity in a simulation heavy game. I have certainly played games where it seems like a lot is going on, but it all just looks kinda dull and repeatitive. But I've also found ways to appreciate the complex systems. I've mentioned Artificial Life for ios in another thread, but it's such a good example. The "game" is hundreds of two-dimensional NPC micro-organisms sliding around in a petri dish with their own hierachy of behaviors. The super cool part is that when they mate, both parents contribute 6(?) behaviors into their offspring which has a total of 12(?) behaviors. When I play the game, it ends up looking like a bunch of creatures running around meaninglessly, but there are waysto appreciate it. One way is to follow an individual NPC for a while. At that scope, the "hair-compexity" would be somewhat valuable, but ultimately novel. Following around individual protozoa gets boring. The Artificial Life "game" suggests that programming an individual NPC with your own instructions and watching to see how long it survives is a good strategy for appreciating the complexity, but it doesn't help the player appreciate the complexity as much as it helps them appreciate the potential. The way I've come to enjoy the "game" is to observed various areas of the petri dish over time. Once the simulation has been running for a while, evolutionary strategies emmerge and are incredibly interesting. I've seen colonies who do things like hibernation until they become weak, and only then di they feed or mate. Other colonies will swarm around the petri dish just ravaging anything that they are not related to. Some colonies will basically become herbivores, depending on high fertility and maintaining a proximity to where food spawns. The challenge for the designer is to communicate objecties and provide interactive capabilities that will quickly lead the player to discover and invest in the complexity. I think that in the case of Artificia Life, a good way of doing this would be to give the playerthe ability cordone off areas and move individual protozoa into protected areas. This would allow players to breed the protozoa. Another way to encourage the player to discover and appreciate the complexity of a simulation is to allow he player to create "fitness functions" for the genetic algorithm. I hope that behaviors will be exchanged between prisoners in Prison Architect (similar to Artificial Life's mating mechanic) because I expect that the player will be able to create fitness functions for prisoners by conditioning with things like regular food, comfort, and socialization. The main point of the gamasutra article is a good one. Designers can't just make complex simulations and expect that players will be able to appreciate them. Designers also have to consider the "Player model" and how they will expose the interesting simulation aspects to the player. I understand the idea that apophenia should be prioritized over unseen complex systems, but I think that finding ways to expose the player to thecomplex systems in a meaningful way is also a good option.

Someone walking down the street is like "Ow! Who the fuck throws a microphone!"

I find the exchange between you two about the punching package, hilarious.

This is such an interesting way of seeing it; specifically the idea that people are attracted to social roles in order to avoid free will. I'll describe my position a bit more thoroughly. I think that the systems in which we inhabit (social roles) are the biggest factor in how we behave. Of course it's a mixture of social roles for each of us, and they are prioritized differently in different circumstances. I would define "environment" as the mixture of circumstances, systems, and the social roles of those around us. I believe that our environment necessitates that we behave in certain ways. Sometimes we have some flexibility in how we go about doing it, but let's face it, there are some default methods in our society to achieve food, shelter, and sex. Those default methods have a convenience to them and it takes a lot of effort and awareness to do anything but the default. So because I feel that most of our behaviors are just base desires and the convenient methods to achieve those desires, free will may exist, but it doesn't seem to come up in the decision making process very often. This perception makes me want to change the default systems in such a way that compassion and awareness and trust are more convenient. I think that my environment in a Virginian college town has managed to do a lot toward this goal when compared to an anarchic situation, but I want to improve it further or at least spread my environment so that others can be compassionate and aware conveniently. In other words, I depend less and less on the idea of free will. But when I get to a certain point in this paradigm, personal accountability comes into question. Should a person be held accountable for their actions, should they receive the rewards and punishments duly? Or should their environment? If an example would be useful to the discussion: I think that the United States military uses this concept to their ends. You can take a peace-loving hippy, give them weapons and training on how to use them, then put them in a situation in which people who speak a different language are shooting at them; and the peace-loving hippy will shoot back. They aren't really making a decision of free will, they are just acting a role in their environment.