It’s exceptionally rare that I get excited about an upcoming movie. But this is one of those rare times:
I really want to see it. If it was out now, I’d make plans to get to the theater and see it this week. But it’s not due out until… July? Pffft. I’ll forget all about it by then. In any case, the concept appeals to me on some fundamental level.
Jay and Corvus got together and decided to tackle a lot of the overlooked questions in last Friday’s Indie Games Debate. They were nice enough to start with the questions I posed earlier this week.
I particularly liked Corvus’ answer to my second question. I don’t want to steal his thunder by excerpting him here, so just check it out for yourself. Also, I should point out that Amanda Fitch answered my questions here in the comments.
I stand corrected on my assertion that Indie games are “mostly” RPG’s. I forget that indie games include all the casual Popcap-type games, Tower Defense knockoffs, and match-3 clones. Aside from the time I needed to go into detox to get rid of a nasty Zuma addiction a few years ago, I don’t really play a lot of attention to those sorts of games. So, my assertion that indie games = RPG’s is the result of my own bias, because those are the developers I read and follow.
And finally, a new (to me) developer was nice enough to stop by but was shy about “spamming” my comments with his project website. Let me just make it official: If you have an indie game you’re working on, you’re always welcome to drop a link in the comments or in an email. (shamus at shamusyoung dot com) This is particularly true if you have a blog.
Here is an interesting gamer: A “hardcore” gamer who is a woman over the age of X, where X is a number I’m too polite to guess at.
It does make me wonder why this is quite such a rare thing. Why aren’t more seniors into gaming? I’m not talking about “why don’t they make more low-key casual games to appeal to the WWII generation”, I’m talking about “Why don’t a few of them get into shooters and RTS games with the rest of us?” It’s not for everyone, but it’s clearly a fun hobby for some people. Yet in this multi-billion dollar industry the idea of a grandma pwning n00bs and so on is rare enough to merit news coverage.
Still, the more the merrier.
One of the guys in my gaming group is an occasional source of chaos and confusion. Once in a while he’ll do something that seems outrageous, crazy, and wildly out-of-character, and the rest of us have to try to come up with ways our characters can compensate to keep the game from flying apart right there. I don’t want to relate a bunch of gaming stories, but it’s become a running joke in our group that his character must be this multiple-personality psycho that wants to donate his money to charity one minute but turn around and light beggars on fire for amusement the next. It’s not quite that bad, but sometimes it feels like it.
Okay, one example, for context:
Psycho gets into the waiting room first. The guards left him with his magical horn. When blown it can be heard a mile away and will stun anyone caught in front of it for a combat round. He proceeds to blast each of the other five party members, one at a time, as they enter the room. He gets right in their face and unloads the horn on them at point-blank. We’re a chamber away from this paranoid queen and he’s hitting us with this earth-shaking horn to knock us over. There is no in-character justification for doing this. There is nothing to be gained by doing this. It brings the roleplaying at the table to a grinding halt, because it’s pure nonsense and nobody knows how to respond. The GM (not me) has to flail around and figure out what to do about this, and has to come up with reasonable reactions from the NPCs to this nonsense player behavior.
(What probably should have happened was that he would be arrested, or maybe executed on the spot. This queen has a notorious nasty streak and is nobody to trifle with. He certainly would have fought back if the guards tried to take him into custody, and… what then? Would we have helped him? The whole thing could have either led to us murdering all of the guards or a TPK. Either way, it could kill the campaign right there.)
Rather than let him take control of the game and stop the rest of us from having fun, the GM just glazed over it and moved on.
Then I read somewhere – and if I’d been on the job I would have bookmarked it – about players “experimenting” with the gameworld, and I realized that was exactly what we were seeing. He doesn’t really want to play a character who is a barking loon. He wasn’t trying to play a jerk. He just wanted to see how the world and the other characters would react. People do this in computer games all the time. I wonder what would happen if I shoot the scientists? Contrary to what videogame reactionaries claim, this doesn’t mean the player is acting out some secret desire to murder members of the scientific community. They just want to see what the game would do about it.
In this way I think the GM’s reaction was a good one. Sure, it was unrealistic and created an odd continuity gap as the NPC’s sort of ignored the crazy stuff he was doing, but it denied the player the feedback he wanted. Letting him take control of the game and turn our story of heroes saving the lands into a story about a bunch of prankster loonies would have only rewarded his behavior. By ignoring it he was deprived of any feedback for his actions. He was still doing crazy stuff, but he was no longer affecting the world. Think of Half-Life 2: You can shoot Alyx right in the face and the bullets go right through and hit the wall behind her. She won’t even notice. If you start acting like an idiot, the game world stops paying attention to you.
In the end, this approach worked. Psycho tried a couple of other minor pranks, and when they didn’t result in mayhem he knocked it off and went back to playing his character honestly.
Of course, the GM could always just respond to this behavior with the standard “you can’t do that”, but this approach is better in my book, as it is impossible for the player to complain or dispute without them admitting and confronting just how disruptive they’re being. The player can’t very well demand continuity from the world when he’s not following any sort of continuity with his character’s behavior. (What’s he gonna do, demand that the guards come in and kill us?) In this case no feedback is actually better than negative feedback. It’s a little passive-agressive, but I think it’s worth it to keep the game moving for the benefit of everyone else at the table. A good GM will talk to the player about it later, but simply denying them the feedback they seek is a good way to stop the behavior without stopping the game.
I never saw this before. Batman: MY PARENTS ARE DEAD! Hilarious.
Someone is toying with the idea of making another RPG comic along the lines of DMotR and Darths & Droids, but using 8-bit sprites: The Returners. I’m not familiar with the game being portrayed so a lot of it went by me, but it’s an interesting idea.
Thanks to Time Well Wasted for this Review of Chainmail Bikini.
Thanks to ChattyDM for weighing in on the “next game system” issue I brought up earlier this week. That was one of the most interesting threads we’ve had here in a while. I’m pretty sold on Savage Worlds, although the rest of my group is still all over the place and I doubt any degree of pursuasion will get them all going in the same direction.
The Comic Irregulars continue to take the gibberish plot gifted to us by George Lucas and twist it into something that makes sense. An amazing accomplishment to be sure.
Over the past couple of weeks Cineris has been throwing links my way on a regular basis and posting in response to stuff here, but for whatever reason Google Blogsearch hasn’t been telling me about it until a couple of days ago. (And I’m waaay behind on my blogreading in general. To the point where it’s almost better to give up on everything I missed in January and start anew.) Rather than burying my belated links back to him on a bunch of old posts, I’ll just sort of point you in his direction with the note that some of the stuff discussed here is also discussed over there and maybe you’ll want to check that out or something.
The Head of Vecna is apparently a classic gaming story that I’ve somehow managed to miss. I don’t understand how they kept out-of-character information from each other so flawlessly, but the result is brilliant.
Almost as funny as the classic Gazebo Battle.
Steven muses about the rise of cancer and asthma. He cites a common concern that these killers are the result of our immune system being underworked by living in such clean conditions.
One thing I’ve always feared is that asthma is growing because we’ve stopped it from killing us, and so asthmatics are breeding. I wouldn’t have made it to adulthood without modern medicine to keep my asthma at bay. Good for me, but perhaps it let me pass the curse on to my kids. (One of our three has Asthma. Thank goodness she’s nowhere near as bad as I was at her age. I’m actually pretty confident she can grow out of it.) Before we had these drugs, people who had severe asthma got weeded out, which always kept our numbers low. (Medicine hasn’t always been our friend. My grandmother died of asthma years before I was born. When she was diagnosed, the doctor wrote her a prescription for cigarettes. To treat her asthma.)
This is not to say I discount the “Hygiene hypothesis“. Like many problems, I suspect that asthma is even more complicated than it seems at first. I’ve met and exchanged notes with many other asthmatics in my life, and one of the most infuriating things about it is how different each case is. Some people grow out of it in their teens. Some people – like me – actually get worse. Some people develop it later in life, after middle age. Some people have attacks triggered by certain allergic reactions. Some by exercise or heavy breathing. Some by certain combinations of temperature and humidity. Some by stress. Some for no discernable reason at all. Some people get attacks that come and go. Some people get attacks that escalate until they intervene with medicine. Some can combat their attacks with folk remedies like caffeine, relaxation, humidifiers, bathing, breathing exercises, or diet changes. Other people only respond to drugs. Some people get attacks deep in their lungs which produce the “wheezing” sound. Some get attacks higher up, where the effect is silent and just produces a “tightness” in the chest.
This is just an overview of the variables in place, as I’ve observed them over the last 30 years or so. I imagine things get more complex, not less, as you get down to the nuts and bolts of what is going on inside the body. The more I learn about asthma the more it seems like a group of conditions which share a common set of symptoms.
It sucks.
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
T w e n t y S i d e d
