See all of my movie reviews.
Sorry guys; five disappointing movies ...
Ready Player One: From Steven Spielberg, this is a shallow, uninteresting movie is about a guy who plays in a virtual world looking for three Easter eggs, or "keys", so that he can gain ownership of the company that owns the virtual world. While he is at it, others are also looking for the keys, one of whom is a woman who joins him as love interest (along with some other guild members), as well as certain high-financed players backed by people who are willing to kill you in the real world if they discover who you are and that you are a competitor.
Within five minutes of the start of the movie I found myself not caring about the boy or anyone else, since there is zero character development. Astonishingly, the amount I cared continued to drop as the movie went along. I didn't think that was possible, since I already didn't care at all, but I managed to continue to care less and less. I eventually figured out that this was because the score was very good. It cued me into thinking, every once in a while, that something that I might care about was about to occur. Each time, however, this never happened.
The amusement of the movie is supposed to come from a) watching other people play video games, which is a colossal bore (unless the player knows how to fill the time with snarky commentary, as people often do on YouTube), and b) seeing hundreds of throwbacks to 1980s video games and fiction. Unlike recent media in which this worked, such as Stranger Things and even Super 8 to an extent, it did not work here. I didn't get 90% of the references, and, anyway, simply seeing references on screen is not what made those other media good; the other media had good stories. And, I guess, we are supposed to be amused by c) the suspense as to whether the main character will solve the rather obvious and uninteresting puzzles and ultimately find the keys and triumph. Duh.
There is not a scrap of emotion in the entire movie. Someone gets killed at one point, but it's someone who we were barely introduced to and who is not shown as having any emotional connection to the main character. I am really in shock at this. This is the emotionally manipulative director who brought us Jaws? E.T.? Shindler's List? Bridge of Spies?
Whatever. I guess, while it is a useless and dull movie, it is not particularly offensive, at least. Oh wait, it is: at the end of the movie the narrator tells us that we shouldn't be spending all of our time playing video games / in virtual reality, but should instead interact with each other more in the real world. Thanks for that very important message; never would have known that.
One more thing that irritated me: T.J. Miller played the exact same character in this movie that he played in Silicon Valley. I liked it in Silicon Valley, but it was pretty out of place here.
Game Night: This is ninety minutes of one joke, the kind of joke that is funny only if it comes once, unexpectedly, in the middle of an otherwise serious situation, but is not funny when it comes repeatedly for ninety minutes. This is a farcical remake of The Game (1997, Michael Douglas). Instead of a strange combination of gaslighting, pursuit, and trying to figure out what is going on as the terror mounts, in this movie the terror happens, but everyone keeps making stupid jokes. It's supposed to be funny, because they keep making light of things while bad things happen; that's the one and only joke, really. The acting, directing, and cinematography were fine. Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams are always cute.
The movie that did this well is The Man Who knew Too Little (1997, Bill Murray), which was a cute and silly movie. I was appalled enough at this movie to happily walk outside the movie theater twice to answer phone calls (I had it on vibrate, guys). If my friends hadn't been with me in the theater, I would have gone home and not gone back in to the theater to finish the movie. In the movie's defense, my friends liked it. They said that they like to see a mindless, silly movie once in a while (I think that's a slight directed at me and my movie choices).
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri: This is a well-acted, grim piece of midwest Americana. Mildred's (Fances McDermott) daughter was raped and murdered several months ago, but she hasn't heard anything from the police who are busy (according to her) chasing and shooting blacks who aren't really doing anything. So she puts up some billboards that pointedly call out the chief of police (Woody Harrelson) in a low-trafficked area. What makes it interesting is that a) she is actually friends with the chief of police, b) the chief is dying of cancer and should really not be at work, and c) the rest of the police dept doesn't take kindly to this, especially one lunatic racist violent hotheaded police creep. Things come to a boil, especially after the police chief shoots himself.
This movie is relentlessly depressing, representing a lot of the worst aspects of American prejudice, violence, despair, and hatred. Just about nobody supports Midred, not even her son. Interestingly, the lunatic police guy actually makes a kind of (unbelievable) change around two thirds into the movie. This should have given us a bit of hope. However, the movie ends just as bleakly and miserably as it started.
Other than being relentlessly depressing, what actually ruins the movie for me are the multiple acts of outrageous criminal behavior performed by multiple people on multiple occasions, some of it incredibly brutal and most of it performed in sight of multiple witnesses. These acts are done and never have repercussions. And I'm not saying that the bad guys weasel their way out of repercussions, I'm saying that the movie doesn't seem to believe that any reactions by the witnesses or police is expected. What the hell? Is this a video game? While I expect to sometimes find injustice in the system, the system still exists; treating violence like it's just a video game broke the reality of the movie for me.
The movie has compelling performances and some good ideas, but it's ultimately not realistic enough to recommend.
The Phantom Thread: Daniel Day Lewis gives another astounding performance as Reynolds, a dressmaker / bachelor / bully and all around a**hole in 1950s London. He is joined by other great performances by Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville, and everyone else in this beautifully shot and artfully scripted period piece about a dressmaker who obsessively creates beautiful dresses, but only if his cadre of assistants take care of his other needs and none of them interrupts his "solitary genius" thinking. This genius is, apparently, sufficient excuse for everyone to give him his way, and for him to throw toxic vitriol at anyone who expresses any kind of opinion, presence, or personality. Like a spoiled baby, as one of the other main characters eventually says.
Krieps plays a waitress, Anna, who is drawn to this bully and who follows him to London to be a dress model and eventually a lover. She falls deeply in love with him - because he is such a genius - and even goes and does some of his bullying for him, both - because he is such a genius - and because she hopes he will one day fall in love with her and allow her to butter her toast in his presence without cursing her out. Even taking into account that this is the 1950s, she is really pathetic; in the first two thirds of the movie, not a moment is shown where she has a relationship with anyone else but him. No family? No friends or neighbors at all?
SPOILERS follow, because really you shouldn't watch this movie, and if you do you should be prepared for what happens.
Anna has a little strength in her, just enough to keep wanting him to love her. And so, one day after she suffers great abuse from him, she poisons him, and he falls sick and can't work for the next few days he is too sick to abuse her, so she is happy. And then, he comes back from his illness and proposes to her.
Okay ... but maybe he doesn't know that she poisoned him?
After the marriage, things go back to as they were, obviously, and he begins to heap abuse at her again until one day she overhears him complaining about how he doesn't want her around as she is disrupting his work. So she poisons him again, and this time he knows it and goes along with it. And he loves her.
And that's the movie. Okay...
So this is a sick, toxic (literally) relationship that works for both of them. She is only happy when he is poisoned and helpless, and he, despite his passion and perfection for work is apparently only able to love her when his work is taken from him and he is poisoned and helpless. Apparently he makes the choice to let her poison him. Perhaps he really doesn't want the endless pressure of being a genius after all? It's hard to say, as the screenwriter leaves it a mystery.
Like Whiplash, I recognize great performances and interesting screenplay, but I can't watch it. Who really wants to watch two hours of repulsive people, where the main character is an abusive, horrible person? A little bit of it in a movie adds color. You know that the scriptwriter threw it in for you to not like the abusive character. But, if the whole movie is about an abusive character who doesn't learn the error of his ways, you get the impression that the scriptwriter thinks that we should be entertained by it, or even sympathetic to this toxic white privileged male jerk.
But I wasn't. And I wasn't. I was simply repulsed. And the perfect "solitary genius" who is too important to be bothered with having to be nice to people is a myth.
Loving Vincent: Like a number of other animations I have reviewed, this work is one of astounding, gorgeous animation but also utterly boring. The plot, such as it is, is ... um ... well, there isn't one. A police officer wanders around trying to deliver a letter and asks a few questions about how Van Gogh died. It is all shots, and scenes, and music, and flaccid unimportant dialog. And nothing happens and there are no characters.
Sunday, March 29, 2020
It's Just Two Spinners Sharing The Night
I finished up the turrets on the Night Spinners last night. I ended up going with a magenta for the Doomweavers, and putting the glow more towards the middle/base. Annoyingly, I painted on my gloss coat which resulted in a yellow/brown tinge getting on them. I'm not sure if it was something in the brush or what but I have to clean up a few parts (it's most noticeable on the white highlights). I'll get to that in a bit and get some grass tufts on there as well, then I have to figure out Falcon turrets.
Recent Playtesting: Apotheosis (FKA Worker Learning)
Apotheosis
Since I last posted about it, I've had the opportunity to play Apotheosis (the current title for my Worker Learning game) about a dozen times. We've quickly iterated on a couple of different aspects, going from 8 starting workers (one level 1 and one level 2 of each type) to 4 (one of each type, some level 1, some level 2, depending on turn order), adding a space to recruit more workers (I'm torn on this), adding a space to pay a chunk of resources for steps on the victory tracks, and tweaking the resolution of the Recall turns and the requirements and rewards for adventures.The current version looks something like this:
You start with a Fighter, a Cleric, a Mage, and a Thief, 0/1/2/2 of them are level 2 at the beginning if you are player 1/2/3/4 (the ones that start leveled up are dealt to you randomly, and no two players will have the same combination of upgraded starting workers).
You take turns either placing a worker and gaining the benefit of that space (your worker must be at least tied for the highest level in that area), or recalling your workers and sending them on an adventure. Most spaces are better if you are higher level, or the right class. You can gain resources, train (level up), claim adventures (so nobody can do them out from under you), buy progress on the victory tracks, turn resources into blessings, which are like wild resources, visit the Throne Room to earn royal favors, or visit the tavern to recruit more workers.
When you place a worker, you have the opportunity to play a Side Quest card for either of 2 effects (one cares about what type of worker you are placing that turn, the other doesn't). When you recall workers, you earn steps on the three victory tracks, and if you qualify, you may do an adventure to earn more steps. The adventures have 3 tiers, and the higher the tier you do, the better the rewards. After returning from an adventure, your workers level up, becoming better at their jobs.
When you do certain Side Quests, or tier 3 adventures, you get a special resource called Spoils. You can visit the throne room to turn those Spoils into Royal Favors, which you can use at certain points on the victory tracks to take a "shortcut" as well as earn a Boon (reusable power card).
Design concerns
I'm noticing a real tightness in the design -- a difficulty creating adventures that are both doable by a player who has not recruited any new workers, but also doable by a player who has. The current level cap is 6, and so I wanted the adventures to require max 6 levels of any one class. If you hire a worker, then place it, and recall once, then you have 2 workers who's levels total 4 or 5 -- that's almost maxed out already! I am considering making the level cap 8 instead of 6, but d6s are easier to use in the prototype. Doing so would allow for more variety and more texture in the adventure requirements. It's also possible that not every adventure needs to be doable without recruiting another worker.
With just 4 types of worker, many of the tier 2 adventures require 3 of the 4 types. So you basically need to train up all of your workers if you wan to use them at all, there's not really such a things as choosing a class and neglecting it. I'm considering adding a 5th worker type to help with this -- it would allow the adventure requirements to be much more diverse.
Another thought is to add Split and/or Prestige classes:
Split classes would be like regular workers, that count as either one or the other of two types (like a Fighter/Thief would count as either a Fighter or a Thief.
Prestige classes would be like super workers that count as BOTH of two different types (Paladin = Fighter AND Cleric). For these you would probably have to discard your previous worker, therefore they BECOME a dual class worker.
Brainstorming possible solutions
Split/Prestige class workers would be pretty cool. but that sounds like expansion content to me. However adding a 5th (maybe even a 6th?) class to make the adventures more different from each other sounds reasonable. But that idea comes with its own challenges...
In the current game, each worker type is associated with 1 resource, and 3 of them are associated with one of the victory tracks. When you recall a fighter, you advance on the Crown Imperial track, and adventures that require fighters advance you further on that track. Thieves are associated with the Prince of Thieves track, and Mages are associated with the Mastermind track. Clerics are great supporting characters -- they aren't associated with any particular track, but instead give you Blessings, which are sort of like a wild resource that can be used in various different ways.
So if another worker type is added, do we need another resource? That might be a pain, but would be doable. Another victory track? I don't necessarily think that's a good idea (though I suppose it could work). What is another iconic adventurer class anyway?
One possibility is to make this 5th class a sort of Split/Prestige class like I mentioned above. Like a Paladin, which could act as either (or both) of a fighter or a cleric. But that would simply overload the fighter related stuff. So maybe better if whatever the new class is, it doesn't advance any of the tracks, but is otherwise "better" than a normal worker (counts as all types when placing?). Or perhaps it advances the track of your choice, and has some other drawback (doesn't count as any type when placing?).
As for the level caps, one way to fix that situation is to not use dice as workers (even though it's super convenient for prototypes). Instead, perhaps a mini or standee, with a base that has a little pointer, then a dial could be attached to the bottom such that the pointer points to the number on the tile corresponding to the current level. This is a user friendly way to not have to use dice, and therefore not be as limited in their value. The level cap could easily be 8, or even 9!
Another, different possible solution to the over-leveling issue is to limit the level-ups to only 1 per recall turn. This would slow things down considerably, and it would probably matter quite a bit which one you choose to gain levels and which ones you don't. It might also make a much bigger difference between playing 1-2 workers then recalling vs playing 3 or 4 before recalling. I'd be afraid this is TOO slow, but it ought to be easy enough to test. If it works, then that would make a level cap of 6 potentially viable after all.
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
Warlord Germans...I Had No Idea....
Warlord infantry section
After years of slagging off 28mm WWII figures a combination of circumstances have led me to dip my toe in the water. To put it simply, I was pleasantly surprised, a lot of the figures I'd seen have been the late war, overly "heroic" (read: Fugly) style, which remain pretty horrible. Then I discovered these early war Warlord plastics, much different, presumably a different designer, nicely proportioned, and as with so many plastics these days, really cleverly designed in terms of pose compatibility within the sprues. I enjoyed putting together the plastics, took me back to the old Airfix multi-pose kits (remember them?) they fit together well, and have some cracking pose combinations.
Then the painting, great fun...a lot more to work with obviously than 20mm, and the overall design lends it to gaining a decent result with only moderate skill with modern paints and techniques.
These I did with Vallejo block painting, then slopping GW Nuln oil all over, then a 2 layer highlight, before doing the flesh last (Vallejo sunny skin with a Lavado skin wash), my usual old lazy basing of PVA and sand +Army Painter Autumn tufts.
I'll talk about the Stugs a bit later.
All this is for Chain of Command, I've found a group in London who play these terrific rules, so this lot will get their first outing next week. However, I have far grander plans for this lot in the future.
More to come!
Saturday, March 21, 2020
Thoughts On Detroit: Become Human
By Thomas Grip
Quantic Dream learns with each game, and adresses their issues with new features. But with new features come new issues, and lots of juicy design lessons. In this blog post I will talk at length about affordance, then touch upon branching and themes.
Intro
It has been a while since my last design blog, and I felt it was finally time to write one again. And since I just played through Detroit: Become Human, that's what I decided to write about.
First off, let me say that I quite liked the game. I had issues with how they tackled some of the themes (especially in regards to robots), and felt they could have taken some aspects of the world they created more seriously.
What made up for the so-so narrative bits were the production value (such as some very cool environments), and the myriad of exciting scenarios. It's not an easy feat to create scenes that are not just narratively compelling, but also engaging play-wise – especially not in the sort of story that Detroit tells.
On top of this, the branching and the choice possibilities in Detroit are insane. It is a lengthy game, taking well over 10 hours to complete, and yet as the story unfolds there is a constant stream of differences that all depend on your previous choices. Everything to how crime scenes change to how characters make remarks depending on how you played some previous scene is amazingly well done. The scenes are constantly constructed from a wide array of options, but everything flows together into a coherent whole. Other branching games, such as Hidden Agenda, have a much more jarring presentation where the inserted lines and cuts in the flow are obvious. In Detroit, flow flaws are basically nonexistent.
So, it is fair to say that production-wise Detroit is quite a achievement. However, the game starts to stumble as it tries to be just that – a game.
Just like with previous titles from Quantic Dream, Detroit tries to be what is essentially a playable movie. Mixing film and games gives rise to all sorts of interesting design decisions and issues – issues that are hard to see in other games. It is clear that Quantic Dream are aware of the flaws they have had in their previous games, and there are a bunch of new feature that try to address the issues.
But with new features come new issues, and lots of juicy design lessons. In this blog post I will talk at length about affordance, then touch upon branching and themes.
Affordance
The first topic of this blog is how Detroit: Become Human handles affordance. The game takes place in one of the most challenging environments there is design-wise: inhabited real-life spaces. Spaces that contain a bunch of everyday items, such as drawers, pictures, tools, televisions, coffee cups, keyboards, clothes and so on and so forth. These are all objects we are not just accustomed to interact with – we also have expectations of their usage. As a player, you need to be able to figure out what objects you can interact with and in doing so you are constantly battling your ingrained notion of how these objects ought to work.
In Heavy Rain (2010), Quantic Dream's earlier game, the only way to figure what you can and cannot interact with is to carefully check your surroundings and see if an interaction icon pops up. There are some objects that signal pretty clearly that you can interact with them, such as a corpse at a crime scene that you are able to examine. A design goal for a game should be to be able to use your intuition to figure out what sort of items you ought to be able to interact with – but the Heavy Rain never lets you train that intuition. Obvious objects are more an exception than a rule, and thus the player's optimal strategy ends up being doing a brute force search of the room to try and locate all the hotspots.
So why is this bad?
There are two main issues with not being to identify points interaction. The first one is that it lessens the game's sense of immersion. The second is that it doesn't allow you to properly "play" the game. Detroit has some tricks up its sleeve to reduce both of these, but before we get into that it is worth to discuss just what is so problematic with these issues.
Immersion
Let us first go over the issue of immersion.
In order for a player to feel immersed in an environment, they need to internalize the surroundings. This is something I have covered in other posts, but basically it means that players need to actively take a part in the fantasy. And in order for a player to feel present inside a virtual world, they need to have what is called internal representation.
While it may not seem like it, real life also operates on internal representation. You don't simply "see a chair". The act of seeing a chair triggers all sorts of data about chairs: what their physical properties are, what you can do with them, what are your available actions and so forth. All of these combine into the actual sensation that there is a chair in front of you.
Here comes the issue. If you play a game where looking at a chair lacks any situational data, the player's mental representation is empty. They fail to build any vivid fantasy for the virtual scene that the game tries to build. In turn the player is unable to place themselves, as in their actual selves, inside the game world. When games fail to take this into account it results in a world that doesn't feel very immersive.
Play
Secondly, the gameplay issue with affordances is that the player lacks the ability to plan. I have gone over player planning and why it is so important for good gameplay in a previous post, but let's do a quick recap: we don't play games by just reacting to stimuli that the games send our way – instead, most of the gameplay takes place inside our heads. We survey our environments, go over long- and short-term goals, and decide what set of actions are the most optimal to reach said goals. The longer and more accurate plans a game allows the player to make, the better it will feel to play.
As a clear example, let's compare a moment playing Dragon's Lair (1983) to a moment in Civilization (1991). Civilization is filled with possibilities and room for planning. Dragon's Lair on the other hand is just a linear path where you can only get good by memorizing a specific sequence. This is not the most fair example, but should illustrate the primal differences.
Games like Heavy Rain and Detroit, as well as classic adventure games, rely on putting the player in a real-life situation and making that the core of planning one's actions. Taken at face value, it's somewhat easy to understand what your options are when trying to find shelter for the night, because it is all based around elements that we know from real life. It's much harder to know what to do during a laser-wielding vampire bat robot attack.
The issue is that the real world is incredibly complex, and a game cannot possibly recreate all the alternatives that a person could think of. This means that even though you might intuitively make up a certain plan, you can't be sure whether the game will actually support it or not.
Solutions?
The main trick of Detroit, and Heavy Rain before it, is to simply make each scene feel like a movie scene. It gives the player a feeling for how the scene ought to evolve next, and how the character(s) ought to react. So the player gains their affordances not from how they view the scene, but how they imagine the characters (and to some extend the director) doing it. On top of that, the very cinematic structure pushes a narrative that makes up for the lack of immersion.
The player's feelings here depend a lot on how they play the game. If they play as if they are the protagonist, these problems can become quite severe. It is a lot less damaging if the player views their role as a director. Then they are distancing themselves from the game and viewing the whole experience differently. Most of the discussions I bring up in this post are mainly centered around the former playstyle where you actively take on the role of a certain character.
Therefore, imagining yourself as the character in Quantic Dream games doesn't really hold up – especially when the player is supposed to have a more lengthy interaction. In Heavy Rain it is easy to fall into optimizing behaviour and do brute force search to see what you can interact with. This sort of searching turns what is supposed to be a realistic environment into an abstract play field. Heavy Rain also has real trouble giving you a sense of your options. So, most of the game is played based on moment-to-moment reactions rather than deliberate planning. More Dragon's Lair than Civilization.
It is clear that Quantic Dream know about these issues, as Detroit does quite a lot of things to try and fix this. The two major ones are explicit hotspots, and quest lists. The hotspots that pop up make it feel like a "batman mode", where the time stops and the environment gets a line-mesh overlay. When in this mode, all nearby possible interactions display glowing icons. On top of this, all of the character's short term goals are displayed as well, including those that haven't been unlocked yet. Detroit also shows various goals, and even characters' feelings, as big in-world text throughout the game. This gives the player a better idea of what they are supposed to do, and what are the available tools to achieve their goals.
Problems
The problem is that these new features don't really try to fix the underlying problems of affordance. They are more like crutches, propping a flawed system. In a perfect world, these systems should be used as a sort of tutorial for the player. Once they get a better sense of how the game works, they should be able to stop relying on them, and instead rely on their intuitive understanding.
What happens instead is the opposite. The further you get into Detroit, the more prone you get to use these systems. In my playthrough of Detroit I used the "batman mode" quite sparingly for the first few hours – but as time went on I used it more, to the point where I almost stopped trying to intuitively parse the environment at all. Why? Because if I didn't use it, I was more likely to miss hotspots and tasks, and therefore not get everything I wanted from the scene.
In the end, this style of play actually made me plan more. But all of this planning was happening in an abstract realm. I was playing a game of "choose from explicit options given to me by the game's designer", rather than actually making decisions based on the world that was presented to me. This often lead to weird situations where I did tasks that I didn't know existed (eg. go look for a bag I didn't even know was there).
Worse still, it made me act less like the characters I was supposed to be playing as. Detroit features a fair bit of detailed crime scenes that I was supposed to search, but because of the crutches I never tried to analyze the scenes as an actual detective. Instead I was simply searching for abstract hotspots. To make matters worse, the game often told me just how many hotspots there were to find, making me feel and thing even less like a detective.
The important takeaway here is just how important it is to find a way to create a game that actually makes the player engage in the game as it is. Detroit is not the only game that uses this kind of crutch, it's quite common. And it is not always bad, either. For instance in Metal Gear Solid you have exclamation points pop up over soldiers' heads when they spot you. However, they key difference here is that it adds information to the scene that is already in front of you. There are actual character models, sounds and so forth that play into the scene.
When you try to design crutches, you need to make sure that they supply something extra to the fantasy. They shouldn't act as a substitute for the game's actual world.
The magic of narrative
It might seem like I didn't like the gameplay in Detroit – but the fact is that I found it quite engaging. I think this is really interesting. Despite all of the apparent flaws in the system, it still felt like I was part of the narrative. This was especially true for the detective work. The same was also true in the 2018 Call of Cthulhu game. There the detective scenes were even more simplistic, almost like playing a basic "hidden object" game, and yet I found them strangely compelling.
How is this possible? I think a lot of this is in line with the 4-layer approach that I've written about before. The foundational thinking with the 4-layer approach is that when you put any gameplay in the context of story, doing that gameplay feels like playing a story. Detroit does a lot of things right when creating this sort of merger between systems and narrative.
First of all, Detroit is very good at setting up the context. A scene always starts with some sort of cutscene ("cutscene" feeling like a weird word in an interactive film game, but working as a distinction in this context), that lays out the story reasons as to why you are doing the investigation. So when you are essentially searching for hotspots, the whole setup makes it feel as if you are doing detective work, even if you are not mentally embracing the detective role.
Secondly, when you find a hotspot, you always get information that has something to do with the narrative. The actual value of the information varies a lot: sometimes it's useful and sometimes it's just techno babble. But in all cases it feels like narrative feedback. When this is combined with the explicit – and very gamey – feedback that says you just found one of the three clues, it feels more like progressing a case than fulfilling abstract game requirements.
Finally, when you manage to find all the clues, the abstract (game-y) accomplishment always comes with some sort of narrative reward. For instance when searching a corpse, you get to view a reconstruction of what happened to this person. In many other cases you may unlock a new dialog option. And in every case you feel like completing the tasks makes you progress the narrative. So, even though the gameplay is abstracted, you still feel like you are inside a story.
The power of holism
On the surface all of this feels a bit like cheating. But I think that's the wrong way to look at it. Instead it's something to be embraced.
In fact, on our journey to progress the storytelling potential of games as a medium, I am of the position that trying to do it without any form of "cheating" is a dead end. All entertainment is based on fooling your audience. Illusion is an essential part of the craft. The trick is just to cheat in such a way that it goes unnoticed.
What feeds into this illusion is the fact that humans tend to be bad at understanding why they're feeling something. As an example: one tends to find a potential partner more attractive when drinking something hot while around the person. That is because hot drinks activate responses similar to arousal, eg. increasing the blood flow. The brain just tends to attribute these responses not to coffee, but to the potential partner, tricking you into thinking you are feeling aroused.
In a similar manner, when you feel accomplished for finding one of the three abstract hotspots, that feeling gets entwined with the detective narrative. These two parts get mixed into a single whole, and that whole becomes a compelling experience. It is worth to note that both sides can help the other. The narrative makes simple gameplay feel exciting, and the feedback on the other hand can make flawed narrative feel compelling. It is larger than the sum of its parts in the purest sense.
You can get an especially good sense of how this two-way feedback works when the system starts breaking down. I find that this can happen quite a lot in Detroit's action sequences. There the narrative stops being the focal point, there are less narrative rewards upon success, and the input gets less clear (as it is merely about split second reactions). As long as the goals and actions are easily identifiable, eg. hiding and closing a door, the narrative-system symbiosis remains in place. But once it turns into blocking and returning punches, the player (or at least I) get distanced from the action. It becomes more of an abstract challenge than a piece of interactive storytelling.
So in a way, the increased abstraction actually works for Detroit's benefit. By showing some numbers going up, and clear objective pointers, the game manages to add a more concrete feedback loop. As explained above, it also comes with issues, but also gives the game more opportunities for narrative-system symbiosis.
Detroit uses the symbiosis to simulate all sorts of situations, often with quite pleasing results. What stood out for me was an interrogation scene with a stressed-out android, and a scene where I had to make sure a police officer didn't become too suspicious of my character. The success of those scenes came from mixing simple, gamey systems together with narrative in a holistic manner.
If you want to dig deeper into various ways to achieve this sort of merging of elements, Detroit is an excellent case study. Since the scenes featured are quite diverse, the ways of combining systems an narrative vary, and the results vary along with that.
Improvements?
While there are many interesting aspects about the game, it does have lot of room for improvement. I want to discuss that a bit.
Detroit relies heavily on increased abstractions (such as the aforementioned hotspots and objectives), and I don't think that's the right way. I find it better to try and achieve the same kind of affordance by using a story-like world. It is not the abstraction per se that allows to combine systems and narrative, but the player's understanding of cause and effect.
Using abstractions also comes with a lot of issues. In my opinion, the biggest issue is the negative effect on immersion. If the world the player navigates is just filled with simple, systems-specific abstractions, the player can never transport themselves into the world.
At best, the actual rendered world (environments, characters etc.) just becomes narrative background. Instead as a designer, you want the world's elements to be what the player uses in order to be an active part of the game. The aim should be for the player to gaze at a rendered scene, and have a mental model of all the interaction points and how these can be used for various plans, as I have written earlier.
Just compare a scene from Detroit…
...to a scene in Super Mario Bros.
In Detroit, I am not sure what things I can interact with, nor how they would affect me. From just looking at the world as-is, it is impossible to make any sort of concrete action plan. On the other hand Mario is very accessible, at least to anyone who has ever played the game. You can easily see every object, imagine how you can interact with it, and plan your progress accordingly.
The sort of readability that a Super Mario game has is what you want as a game designer. The thing to learn from Detroit is that you don't need incredibly complex actions in scenes to create an engaging narrative. In fact, the actual gameplay can be simple and "dull" – as long as you are able to combine it with a narrative. However, there would be a huge difference if the interactions you partake in are grounded in the game's world, instead of just being abstractions.
There are obviously other things to improve, especially the player's ability to plan. But as a first step, I think having Super Mario level of affordance in the game's world would be a huge improvement.
Branching
Now before I end this article, there are two more topics I want to cover. The first of these is branching.
Before making Detroit: Become Human, Quantic Dream made Beyond: Two Souls (2013). This game took a slightly different approach to the idea of a game as an interactive movie – especially when it came to branching. The game's story had a ton of different ways to play out, but as recounted in this article by Press X to Story, it went mostly unnoticed by players.
It feels like Quantic Dream really reacted to this because damn, they are now really pushing the branching angle. There is a node tree at the end of each scene, there's visual cues when conversation subjects unlock, there are lists of things you could do, the latter scenes obviously change, and so on.
And it really does feel like the open story and the branching matters. Especially interesting are the node maps. In the maps, all the choices you could have made are laid out, but the ones you didn't make in your current or previous game are blanked out. At first I really didn't like it, but the more I played the more it grew on me. It seems like it had a certain ad-hoc effect, and I can still sort of feel it. Remembering a scene often feels cooler than actually playing it. To me, the Detroit showing you potential paths I could have taken make my choices seem more compelling, when viewed in retrospect.
This might feel a bit like a cheat. But as discussed before, cheating is how entertainment works. Still, a part of me wonders if Detroit could have handled it in a more subtle way. Sometimes it felt like too much to get all the possible courses of events shoved in my face. I would have liked it if the would have treated the overall branching as it did the special dialog and changes in scenes. But at the same time, I wonder if that would have given across the feeling that the story was indeed open-ended and had tons of options – as Beyond: Two Souls failed to convey.
The best way to get away from the trap of being overly explicit is to, as explained above, up the level of affordance. In a perfect scenario, the player should know about the ways the scene could have gone simply by having mentally analyzed the scene. For instance, Civilization doesn't need a node map at the end of a round for the player to know that there are many other ways things could have gone. This is not the most fair comparison, as I don't think it's possible to make a storytelling game that is as systemically driven. But it does give you a sense of what sort of feeling games could strive for.
Themes
Given that Detroit deals with a few themes similar to SOMA, it feels like I need to say something about Detroit's themes to close this off. It would be too much to go over all aspects of the game, so I will just focus on one: robot and human similarities.
I think the game would have been a lot more thematically interesting if the robots didn't look so human. Instead I think it would have been much better if they looked like the robots from the movie I, Robot (2004), or perhaps something out of the Boston Dynamics lab.
Right now it's just too easy to sympathise with the robots. It would be much more fun if the player started the game thinking the robots did not deserve any rights, and the thinking would evolve throughout the game.
The robots' thinking is also too human. Again, it would be much cooler if they felt more alien in how they handled their emotions and so forth. There is actually less neurodiversity between humans and robots in Detroit than there is among real humans overall.
For example, right now it doesn't make much sense for a player to want for Connor to stay an obedient robot. The story pretty clearly pushes the player to want Connor to become a deviant (a robot free from human masters). If the Connor had looked a bit more spooky, or had weirder ways of thinking, it would have made the choice less obvious and forced me to think more about my alternatives.
It would also seem weird that people would want to buy servants that look so human. People can already feel bad for a Roomba, let alone something that looks like a fellow human. It would make more sense for the robots to actually look like robots.
I know that Quantic Dream wanted to show off their facial animation tech, and make sure it was easy to relate to the protagonists. But the point stands: a version of Detroit with robots that are clearly not human would be damn interesting to play.
Quantic Dream learns with each game, and adresses their issues with new features. But with new features come new issues, and lots of juicy design lessons. In this blog post I will talk at length about affordance, then touch upon branching and themes.
Intro
It has been a while since my last design blog, and I felt it was finally time to write one again. And since I just played through Detroit: Become Human, that's what I decided to write about.
First off, let me say that I quite liked the game. I had issues with how they tackled some of the themes (especially in regards to robots), and felt they could have taken some aspects of the world they created more seriously.
What made up for the so-so narrative bits were the production value (such as some very cool environments), and the myriad of exciting scenarios. It's not an easy feat to create scenes that are not just narratively compelling, but also engaging play-wise – especially not in the sort of story that Detroit tells.
On top of this, the branching and the choice possibilities in Detroit are insane. It is a lengthy game, taking well over 10 hours to complete, and yet as the story unfolds there is a constant stream of differences that all depend on your previous choices. Everything to how crime scenes change to how characters make remarks depending on how you played some previous scene is amazingly well done. The scenes are constantly constructed from a wide array of options, but everything flows together into a coherent whole. Other branching games, such as Hidden Agenda, have a much more jarring presentation where the inserted lines and cuts in the flow are obvious. In Detroit, flow flaws are basically nonexistent.
So, it is fair to say that production-wise Detroit is quite a achievement. However, the game starts to stumble as it tries to be just that – a game.
Just like with previous titles from Quantic Dream, Detroit tries to be what is essentially a playable movie. Mixing film and games gives rise to all sorts of interesting design decisions and issues – issues that are hard to see in other games. It is clear that Quantic Dream are aware of the flaws they have had in their previous games, and there are a bunch of new feature that try to address the issues.
But with new features come new issues, and lots of juicy design lessons. In this blog post I will talk at length about affordance, then touch upon branching and themes.
Affordance
The first topic of this blog is how Detroit: Become Human handles affordance. The game takes place in one of the most challenging environments there is design-wise: inhabited real-life spaces. Spaces that contain a bunch of everyday items, such as drawers, pictures, tools, televisions, coffee cups, keyboards, clothes and so on and so forth. These are all objects we are not just accustomed to interact with – we also have expectations of their usage. As a player, you need to be able to figure out what objects you can interact with and in doing so you are constantly battling your ingrained notion of how these objects ought to work.
In Heavy Rain (2010), Quantic Dream's earlier game, the only way to figure what you can and cannot interact with is to carefully check your surroundings and see if an interaction icon pops up. There are some objects that signal pretty clearly that you can interact with them, such as a corpse at a crime scene that you are able to examine. A design goal for a game should be to be able to use your intuition to figure out what sort of items you ought to be able to interact with – but the Heavy Rain never lets you train that intuition. Obvious objects are more an exception than a rule, and thus the player's optimal strategy ends up being doing a brute force search of the room to try and locate all the hotspots.
So why is this bad?
There are two main issues with not being to identify points interaction. The first one is that it lessens the game's sense of immersion. The second is that it doesn't allow you to properly "play" the game. Detroit has some tricks up its sleeve to reduce both of these, but before we get into that it is worth to discuss just what is so problematic with these issues.
Immersion
Let us first go over the issue of immersion.
In order for a player to feel immersed in an environment, they need to internalize the surroundings. This is something I have covered in other posts, but basically it means that players need to actively take a part in the fantasy. And in order for a player to feel present inside a virtual world, they need to have what is called internal representation.
While it may not seem like it, real life also operates on internal representation. You don't simply "see a chair". The act of seeing a chair triggers all sorts of data about chairs: what their physical properties are, what you can do with them, what are your available actions and so forth. All of these combine into the actual sensation that there is a chair in front of you.
Here comes the issue. If you play a game where looking at a chair lacks any situational data, the player's mental representation is empty. They fail to build any vivid fantasy for the virtual scene that the game tries to build. In turn the player is unable to place themselves, as in their actual selves, inside the game world. When games fail to take this into account it results in a world that doesn't feel very immersive.
Play
Secondly, the gameplay issue with affordances is that the player lacks the ability to plan. I have gone over player planning and why it is so important for good gameplay in a previous post, but let's do a quick recap: we don't play games by just reacting to stimuli that the games send our way – instead, most of the gameplay takes place inside our heads. We survey our environments, go over long- and short-term goals, and decide what set of actions are the most optimal to reach said goals. The longer and more accurate plans a game allows the player to make, the better it will feel to play.
As a clear example, let's compare a moment playing Dragon's Lair (1983) to a moment in Civilization (1991). Civilization is filled with possibilities and room for planning. Dragon's Lair on the other hand is just a linear path where you can only get good by memorizing a specific sequence. This is not the most fair example, but should illustrate the primal differences.
Games like Heavy Rain and Detroit, as well as classic adventure games, rely on putting the player in a real-life situation and making that the core of planning one's actions. Taken at face value, it's somewhat easy to understand what your options are when trying to find shelter for the night, because it is all based around elements that we know from real life. It's much harder to know what to do during a laser-wielding vampire bat robot attack.
The issue is that the real world is incredibly complex, and a game cannot possibly recreate all the alternatives that a person could think of. This means that even though you might intuitively make up a certain plan, you can't be sure whether the game will actually support it or not.
Solutions?
The main trick of Detroit, and Heavy Rain before it, is to simply make each scene feel like a movie scene. It gives the player a feeling for how the scene ought to evolve next, and how the character(s) ought to react. So the player gains their affordances not from how they view the scene, but how they imagine the characters (and to some extend the director) doing it. On top of that, the very cinematic structure pushes a narrative that makes up for the lack of immersion.
The player's feelings here depend a lot on how they play the game. If they play as if they are the protagonist, these problems can become quite severe. It is a lot less damaging if the player views their role as a director. Then they are distancing themselves from the game and viewing the whole experience differently. Most of the discussions I bring up in this post are mainly centered around the former playstyle where you actively take on the role of a certain character.
Therefore, imagining yourself as the character in Quantic Dream games doesn't really hold up – especially when the player is supposed to have a more lengthy interaction. In Heavy Rain it is easy to fall into optimizing behaviour and do brute force search to see what you can interact with. This sort of searching turns what is supposed to be a realistic environment into an abstract play field. Heavy Rain also has real trouble giving you a sense of your options. So, most of the game is played based on moment-to-moment reactions rather than deliberate planning. More Dragon's Lair than Civilization.
It is clear that Quantic Dream know about these issues, as Detroit does quite a lot of things to try and fix this. The two major ones are explicit hotspots, and quest lists. The hotspots that pop up make it feel like a "batman mode", where the time stops and the environment gets a line-mesh overlay. When in this mode, all nearby possible interactions display glowing icons. On top of this, all of the character's short term goals are displayed as well, including those that haven't been unlocked yet. Detroit also shows various goals, and even characters' feelings, as big in-world text throughout the game. This gives the player a better idea of what they are supposed to do, and what are the available tools to achieve their goals.
Problems
The problem is that these new features don't really try to fix the underlying problems of affordance. They are more like crutches, propping a flawed system. In a perfect world, these systems should be used as a sort of tutorial for the player. Once they get a better sense of how the game works, they should be able to stop relying on them, and instead rely on their intuitive understanding.
What happens instead is the opposite. The further you get into Detroit, the more prone you get to use these systems. In my playthrough of Detroit I used the "batman mode" quite sparingly for the first few hours – but as time went on I used it more, to the point where I almost stopped trying to intuitively parse the environment at all. Why? Because if I didn't use it, I was more likely to miss hotspots and tasks, and therefore not get everything I wanted from the scene.
In the end, this style of play actually made me plan more. But all of this planning was happening in an abstract realm. I was playing a game of "choose from explicit options given to me by the game's designer", rather than actually making decisions based on the world that was presented to me. This often lead to weird situations where I did tasks that I didn't know existed (eg. go look for a bag I didn't even know was there).
Worse still, it made me act less like the characters I was supposed to be playing as. Detroit features a fair bit of detailed crime scenes that I was supposed to search, but because of the crutches I never tried to analyze the scenes as an actual detective. Instead I was simply searching for abstract hotspots. To make matters worse, the game often told me just how many hotspots there were to find, making me feel and thing even less like a detective.
The important takeaway here is just how important it is to find a way to create a game that actually makes the player engage in the game as it is. Detroit is not the only game that uses this kind of crutch, it's quite common. And it is not always bad, either. For instance in Metal Gear Solid you have exclamation points pop up over soldiers' heads when they spot you. However, they key difference here is that it adds information to the scene that is already in front of you. There are actual character models, sounds and so forth that play into the scene.
When you try to design crutches, you need to make sure that they supply something extra to the fantasy. They shouldn't act as a substitute for the game's actual world.
The magic of narrative
It might seem like I didn't like the gameplay in Detroit – but the fact is that I found it quite engaging. I think this is really interesting. Despite all of the apparent flaws in the system, it still felt like I was part of the narrative. This was especially true for the detective work. The same was also true in the 2018 Call of Cthulhu game. There the detective scenes were even more simplistic, almost like playing a basic "hidden object" game, and yet I found them strangely compelling.
How is this possible? I think a lot of this is in line with the 4-layer approach that I've written about before. The foundational thinking with the 4-layer approach is that when you put any gameplay in the context of story, doing that gameplay feels like playing a story. Detroit does a lot of things right when creating this sort of merger between systems and narrative.
First of all, Detroit is very good at setting up the context. A scene always starts with some sort of cutscene ("cutscene" feeling like a weird word in an interactive film game, but working as a distinction in this context), that lays out the story reasons as to why you are doing the investigation. So when you are essentially searching for hotspots, the whole setup makes it feel as if you are doing detective work, even if you are not mentally embracing the detective role.
Secondly, when you find a hotspot, you always get information that has something to do with the narrative. The actual value of the information varies a lot: sometimes it's useful and sometimes it's just techno babble. But in all cases it feels like narrative feedback. When this is combined with the explicit – and very gamey – feedback that says you just found one of the three clues, it feels more like progressing a case than fulfilling abstract game requirements.
Finally, when you manage to find all the clues, the abstract (game-y) accomplishment always comes with some sort of narrative reward. For instance when searching a corpse, you get to view a reconstruction of what happened to this person. In many other cases you may unlock a new dialog option. And in every case you feel like completing the tasks makes you progress the narrative. So, even though the gameplay is abstracted, you still feel like you are inside a story.
The power of holism
On the surface all of this feels a bit like cheating. But I think that's the wrong way to look at it. Instead it's something to be embraced.
In fact, on our journey to progress the storytelling potential of games as a medium, I am of the position that trying to do it without any form of "cheating" is a dead end. All entertainment is based on fooling your audience. Illusion is an essential part of the craft. The trick is just to cheat in such a way that it goes unnoticed.
What feeds into this illusion is the fact that humans tend to be bad at understanding why they're feeling something. As an example: one tends to find a potential partner more attractive when drinking something hot while around the person. That is because hot drinks activate responses similar to arousal, eg. increasing the blood flow. The brain just tends to attribute these responses not to coffee, but to the potential partner, tricking you into thinking you are feeling aroused.
In a similar manner, when you feel accomplished for finding one of the three abstract hotspots, that feeling gets entwined with the detective narrative. These two parts get mixed into a single whole, and that whole becomes a compelling experience. It is worth to note that both sides can help the other. The narrative makes simple gameplay feel exciting, and the feedback on the other hand can make flawed narrative feel compelling. It is larger than the sum of its parts in the purest sense.
You can get an especially good sense of how this two-way feedback works when the system starts breaking down. I find that this can happen quite a lot in Detroit's action sequences. There the narrative stops being the focal point, there are less narrative rewards upon success, and the input gets less clear (as it is merely about split second reactions). As long as the goals and actions are easily identifiable, eg. hiding and closing a door, the narrative-system symbiosis remains in place. But once it turns into blocking and returning punches, the player (or at least I) get distanced from the action. It becomes more of an abstract challenge than a piece of interactive storytelling.
So in a way, the increased abstraction actually works for Detroit's benefit. By showing some numbers going up, and clear objective pointers, the game manages to add a more concrete feedback loop. As explained above, it also comes with issues, but also gives the game more opportunities for narrative-system symbiosis.
Detroit uses the symbiosis to simulate all sorts of situations, often with quite pleasing results. What stood out for me was an interrogation scene with a stressed-out android, and a scene where I had to make sure a police officer didn't become too suspicious of my character. The success of those scenes came from mixing simple, gamey systems together with narrative in a holistic manner.
If you want to dig deeper into various ways to achieve this sort of merging of elements, Detroit is an excellent case study. Since the scenes featured are quite diverse, the ways of combining systems an narrative vary, and the results vary along with that.
Improvements?
While there are many interesting aspects about the game, it does have lot of room for improvement. I want to discuss that a bit.
Detroit relies heavily on increased abstractions (such as the aforementioned hotspots and objectives), and I don't think that's the right way. I find it better to try and achieve the same kind of affordance by using a story-like world. It is not the abstraction per se that allows to combine systems and narrative, but the player's understanding of cause and effect.
Using abstractions also comes with a lot of issues. In my opinion, the biggest issue is the negative effect on immersion. If the world the player navigates is just filled with simple, systems-specific abstractions, the player can never transport themselves into the world.
At best, the actual rendered world (environments, characters etc.) just becomes narrative background. Instead as a designer, you want the world's elements to be what the player uses in order to be an active part of the game. The aim should be for the player to gaze at a rendered scene, and have a mental model of all the interaction points and how these can be used for various plans, as I have written earlier.
Just compare a scene from Detroit…
...to a scene in Super Mario Bros.
In Detroit, I am not sure what things I can interact with, nor how they would affect me. From just looking at the world as-is, it is impossible to make any sort of concrete action plan. On the other hand Mario is very accessible, at least to anyone who has ever played the game. You can easily see every object, imagine how you can interact with it, and plan your progress accordingly.
The sort of readability that a Super Mario game has is what you want as a game designer. The thing to learn from Detroit is that you don't need incredibly complex actions in scenes to create an engaging narrative. In fact, the actual gameplay can be simple and "dull" – as long as you are able to combine it with a narrative. However, there would be a huge difference if the interactions you partake in are grounded in the game's world, instead of just being abstractions.
There are obviously other things to improve, especially the player's ability to plan. But as a first step, I think having Super Mario level of affordance in the game's world would be a huge improvement.
Branching
Now before I end this article, there are two more topics I want to cover. The first of these is branching.
Before making Detroit: Become Human, Quantic Dream made Beyond: Two Souls (2013). This game took a slightly different approach to the idea of a game as an interactive movie – especially when it came to branching. The game's story had a ton of different ways to play out, but as recounted in this article by Press X to Story, it went mostly unnoticed by players.
It feels like Quantic Dream really reacted to this because damn, they are now really pushing the branching angle. There is a node tree at the end of each scene, there's visual cues when conversation subjects unlock, there are lists of things you could do, the latter scenes obviously change, and so on.
And it really does feel like the open story and the branching matters. Especially interesting are the node maps. In the maps, all the choices you could have made are laid out, but the ones you didn't make in your current or previous game are blanked out. At first I really didn't like it, but the more I played the more it grew on me. It seems like it had a certain ad-hoc effect, and I can still sort of feel it. Remembering a scene often feels cooler than actually playing it. To me, the Detroit showing you potential paths I could have taken make my choices seem more compelling, when viewed in retrospect.
This might feel a bit like a cheat. But as discussed before, cheating is how entertainment works. Still, a part of me wonders if Detroit could have handled it in a more subtle way. Sometimes it felt like too much to get all the possible courses of events shoved in my face. I would have liked it if the would have treated the overall branching as it did the special dialog and changes in scenes. But at the same time, I wonder if that would have given across the feeling that the story was indeed open-ended and had tons of options – as Beyond: Two Souls failed to convey.
The best way to get away from the trap of being overly explicit is to, as explained above, up the level of affordance. In a perfect scenario, the player should know about the ways the scene could have gone simply by having mentally analyzed the scene. For instance, Civilization doesn't need a node map at the end of a round for the player to know that there are many other ways things could have gone. This is not the most fair comparison, as I don't think it's possible to make a storytelling game that is as systemically driven. But it does give you a sense of what sort of feeling games could strive for.
Themes
Given that Detroit deals with a few themes similar to SOMA, it feels like I need to say something about Detroit's themes to close this off. It would be too much to go over all aspects of the game, so I will just focus on one: robot and human similarities.
I think the game would have been a lot more thematically interesting if the robots didn't look so human. Instead I think it would have been much better if they looked like the robots from the movie I, Robot (2004), or perhaps something out of the Boston Dynamics lab.
Right now it's just too easy to sympathise with the robots. It would be much more fun if the player started the game thinking the robots did not deserve any rights, and the thinking would evolve throughout the game.
The robots' thinking is also too human. Again, it would be much cooler if they felt more alien in how they handled their emotions and so forth. There is actually less neurodiversity between humans and robots in Detroit than there is among real humans overall.
For example, right now it doesn't make much sense for a player to want for Connor to stay an obedient robot. The story pretty clearly pushes the player to want Connor to become a deviant (a robot free from human masters). If the Connor had looked a bit more spooky, or had weirder ways of thinking, it would have made the choice less obvious and forced me to think more about my alternatives.
It would also seem weird that people would want to buy servants that look so human. People can already feel bad for a Roomba, let alone something that looks like a fellow human. It would make more sense for the robots to actually look like robots.
I know that Quantic Dream wanted to show off their facial animation tech, and make sure it was easy to relate to the protagonists. But the point stands: a version of Detroit with robots that are clearly not human would be damn interesting to play.
Friday, March 20, 2020
Global Game Jam 2018 @ KSU 48 HOURS Jam!
IMPORTANT UPDATE: GGJ @ KSU will be OPEN for the ENTIRE 48 hours.
The Global Game Jam 2018 @ KSU will be held from Friday, January 26th through Sunday, January 28th.This is a great opportunity to come and make a game over a weekend. Anyone can join in regardless of skill or experience. Come and have fun, learn, and meet some new people.
Come to the J/Atrium building (Marietta campus). Driving directions and a campus map is available at http://www.kennesaw.edu/maps/docs/marietta_printable_campus_map.pdf and http://www.kennesaw.edu/directionsparking.php
Register now and save, registration fee increases to $45 on January 19th
https://epay.kennesaw.edu/C20923_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=2015
You will also need to register https://globalgamejam.org/2018/jam-sites/kennesaw-state-university
The registration desk will be on Level 2 of J-Block at 1:00 pm.
The opening ceremonies will take place in Q-202 and will start at 4:30 pm. The jam will take place in J-Block and will start at 6:00 pm on Friday January 26, 2019.
This is an 18 Plus event. If you are not 18 or older, you will not be able to participate.
Mega EverDrive X7 - Almost Everything You'd Want In A Flash Cart
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| Mega EverDrive X7, courtesy of Amazon.com |
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Generation Zero Game Trailer
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
PUBG Moblie 0.11.5 Update
After the 0.11.0 update, PUBG Corp. has planned to release the very next update i.e. 0.11.5. This post will introduce players with the new features available in this update.
Recently, the 0.11.0 update was launched in PUBG mobile. This update basically included the Survive till dawn or the PUBG Zombie mode. Some updates including Riot shield and others were also planned to release in this update but they were postponed as the 0.11.0 update had a big size (about 1.7 GB) and it was exerting a lot of pressure.
So returning to topic, PUBG update 0.11.5 will include the following features.
1. G36C (Gun) :
It is an assault rifle gun requiring 5.56 mm ammo. This gun was planned to release in Season 5 but unfortunately, it was skipped and now it is planned in the next update. You can watch the video to learn more about it.
2. Tukshai (Vehicle) :
The next PUBG update includes an auto-rickshaw, Auto-rickshaw is a vehicle mainly found in Asian countries. This vehicle will be available only in Sanhok map. It can carry up to 3 players. Click here to know more about it.
3. Canted Sight (Attachment) :
It is a secondary attachment that allows the player to quickly switch between the 1x Canted sight and the other scope used. It is already launched in PUBG PC, Xbox and PS4. To know more about Canted sight you can visit my post about it.
4. Skorpion (Gun) :
It is a full-auto weapon pistol that works on 9mm ammo. Its capacity can be increased from default 20 rounds to 40 rounds using a standard extended magazine. It can be switched from single fire to full auto. The only disadvantage is that it has lower per bullet damage than other pistols.
5. Royale Pass Season 6 :
As we know the Season 5 of PUBG will end on 18 March 2019. This new season will bring new emodes. Also, many new outfits will be available including Joker and Harley quuen outfits. These two outfits were actually planned before the beginning of Season 4 but it was included in that season. So now there is a hope of getting it in Season 5.
Excluding these some more features may be added in the future. You can click here to know more PUBG upcoming updates.
Which of the above features will be more interesting and enjoyable to play? Let us know in the comment section below.
Recently, the 0.11.0 update was launched in PUBG mobile. This update basically included the Survive till dawn or the PUBG Zombie mode. Some updates including Riot shield and others were also planned to release in this update but they were postponed as the 0.11.0 update had a big size (about 1.7 GB) and it was exerting a lot of pressure.
So returning to topic, PUBG update 0.11.5 will include the following features.
1. G36C (Gun) :
It is an assault rifle gun requiring 5.56 mm ammo. This gun was planned to release in Season 5 but unfortunately, it was skipped and now it is planned in the next update. You can watch the video to learn more about it.
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| G36C gun |
2. Tukshai (Vehicle) :
The next PUBG update includes an auto-rickshaw, Auto-rickshaw is a vehicle mainly found in Asian countries. This vehicle will be available only in Sanhok map. It can carry up to 3 players. Click here to know more about it.
 |
| Tukshai |
3. Canted Sight (Attachment) :
It is a secondary attachment that allows the player to quickly switch between the 1x Canted sight and the other scope used. It is already launched in PUBG PC, Xbox and PS4. To know more about Canted sight you can visit my post about it.
4. Skorpion (Gun) :
It is a full-auto weapon pistol that works on 9mm ammo. Its capacity can be increased from default 20 rounds to 40 rounds using a standard extended magazine. It can be switched from single fire to full auto. The only disadvantage is that it has lower per bullet damage than other pistols.
 |
| Skorpion |
5. Royale Pass Season 6 :
As we know the Season 5 of PUBG will end on 18 March 2019. This new season will bring new emodes. Also, many new outfits will be available including Joker and Harley quuen outfits. These two outfits were actually planned before the beginning of Season 4 but it was included in that season. So now there is a hope of getting it in Season 5.
Excluding these some more features may be added in the future. You can click here to know more PUBG upcoming updates.
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| RP Season 6 |
Release date :
It is expected that this 0.11.5 update will be released between 18-20 March 2019. there is no strong proof that this date is accurate but since season 5 will end on 18 March so there is a chance of releasing season 6bor this PUBG update between the mentioned date.
It is expected that this 0.11.5 update will be released between 18-20 March 2019. Though it is not officially declared or announced but since Season 5 will end on 18 March, so the new season or season 5 release date comes out to be between 18-20 March 2019.
It is expected that this 0.11.5 update will be released between 18-20 March 2019. Though it is not officially declared or announced but since Season 5 will end on 18 March, so the new season or season 5 release date comes out to be between 18-20 March 2019.
Which of the above features will be more interesting and enjoyable to play? Let us know in the comment section below.
Monday, March 16, 2020
So Far Behind...
I haven't talked about so many gaming things happening in my life the last few weeks.
First, I went to DesotoCon, in Kansas, back at the end of July. I started a blog post about it and will finish it, I promise. It's even going to be back dated so it will appear before this one. Not many (any?) photos from it though. Well, a few, I think.
The next week I went to Indianapolis for GenCon. Met a lot of great people, hung out with some friends from Thread Raiders, Saving Throw Show, and Dragons and Things (best Pathfinder liveplay stream, Fridays at 6:00 Pacific on Twitch). Bought a bunch of stuff. Again, it deserves it's own post and I will work on that. A few more photos there.
I've also released the first product from Goblyn Head Press on DriveThruRPG. It's a supplement designed for D&D 5e called Sacred Sites. It was written by Eli Arndt, who you ugys have seen me mention before around here. Nine different places you can encounter the sacred or profane. It has sold a few copies already and it's only been up about a week. Very excited about that. Probably deserves it's own post, too.
And we've gotten a few more sessions of Starfinder in. Kicked one guy out of our group, got another new player. Still sitting at three players so if anyone wants to join us in Santa Fe, TX (in Galveston County, on the mainland)...
And I painted a few minis. Not much. I really need to get to work on the Pledge or I am screwed.
Oh, two new display cases came in and I got one put together. Detolf from IKEA.
And I have been drawing more maps on my Wacom tablet. So that's getting me closer to done with another Goblyn Head project.
All in all, I guess I have been busy. Just not very good at reporting. I'll try to get caught up on all of that the next few days.
First, I went to DesotoCon, in Kansas, back at the end of July. I started a blog post about it and will finish it, I promise. It's even going to be back dated so it will appear before this one. Not many (any?) photos from it though. Well, a few, I think.
The next week I went to Indianapolis for GenCon. Met a lot of great people, hung out with some friends from Thread Raiders, Saving Throw Show, and Dragons and Things (best Pathfinder liveplay stream, Fridays at 6:00 Pacific on Twitch). Bought a bunch of stuff. Again, it deserves it's own post and I will work on that. A few more photos there.
I've also released the first product from Goblyn Head Press on DriveThruRPG. It's a supplement designed for D&D 5e called Sacred Sites. It was written by Eli Arndt, who you ugys have seen me mention before around here. Nine different places you can encounter the sacred or profane. It has sold a few copies already and it's only been up about a week. Very excited about that. Probably deserves it's own post, too.
And we've gotten a few more sessions of Starfinder in. Kicked one guy out of our group, got another new player. Still sitting at three players so if anyone wants to join us in Santa Fe, TX (in Galveston County, on the mainland)...
And I painted a few minis. Not much. I really need to get to work on the Pledge or I am screwed.
Oh, two new display cases came in and I got one put together. Detolf from IKEA.
All in all, I guess I have been busy. Just not very good at reporting. I'll try to get caught up on all of that the next few days.
Friday, March 6, 2020
A New Streak?
What's going on everyone!?
I've been doing some more packing and moving today and am glad to be relaxing here at home.
Today for the #2019gameaday challenge I decided to play Star Realms because I just can't stay away, lol!
For a change I actually won the game I lost 2 nights ago and it seemed like I did it with ease!
As always, thank you for reading and don't forget to stop and smell the meeples! :)
-Tim
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