Perhaps to counter-balance the packed cast of last week, we’ve got a skeleton crew this week. As a result, no Spoiler Warning. But! Double Diecast. Here’s the first one…
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Hosts: Josh, Rutskarn, and Shamus.
Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #55: Mailbag!”
Link (YouTube) |
George asks, “Doesn’t that feel good?” There’s a really interesting divide here between types of players, and I feel like if we drilled down far enough we’d uncover some fundamental stuff about personalities and the way people cope with frustration. Rutskarn and I generally don’t experience that euphoric rush when we finally overcome a challenge. It’s more a sense of grudging relief, like when the dentist finally puts the drill down. It’s not a reward, it’s just the end of the thing that was making you miserable.
Josh and George are clearly the other sort of person. You can hear it when Josh screams “YEAH!” when he finally nails a challenge. George likewise evidently gets some kind of gratification from the process.
Which makes talking about this game really frustrating for me. Fans keep trying to explain to me that I just need to stick with it long enough to get that sense of accomplishment. But it will never happen because I’m not wired that way and don’t play games for those reasons. They assume that I just need to stick with it long enough to feel the release and I’ll be hooked. They’re selling me on the basis of a high that I will never feel.
Making things more complex is that for the Josh-types of tthe world, it seems like the higher the frustration, the better the payoff. It’s nice to beat the guy who killed you twice, but it’s SUPER AWESOME to finally beat the guy who killed you ten times. This is also not the case for me. It intensifies the misery of playing the game, but when it’s over I don’t get a bigger payoff.
In my case, I’m kind of always getting a payoff while I’m playing a game… until the moment I lose progress. I don’t start having fun again until I reach the point where I can repeat the challenge. So the more frustrating the boss, the less rewarding the game is. For me the reward isn’t finishing the job, it’s in doing (and perhaps optimizing) the job. Josh is gardening so he can grow the biggest squash and wow the townsfolk. I’m gardening because I like to garden, provided my efforts aren’t getting bulldozed every so often.
It doesn’t have anything to do with “getting good”. We experience games in very different ways and it’s not really related to skill level. Getting better would make the game less miserable, but it would never give me the the feeling of “victory”.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that this is related to people’s attitude towards PvP. Josh is into PvP. I’m not. I hate losing and I don’t get a lot out of winning.
Anyway. That’s Dark Souls. Next week we’re heading back to Skyrim.
Thanks again to George for Spoilering with us!
Hey everyone, Josh is playing Dark Souls 2 for the very first time right now. Watch it now on Twitch.
I missed the end of the stream, right when JPH showed up and was about to do some co-op with Josh. Someone tell me how it ended!
Anyway. Fun times. Gorgeous game. Looks hard. Thanks for watching.
Link (YouTube) |
Ah, the joys of doing a show unrehearsed, unplanned, and un… sane. This is one of those moments we couldn’t have achieved if we wanted to. It just had to happen on its own. I’d love to hear some theories on what the other player was doing. He seemed to swing wildly from super-tryhard to self-destruction. I assume there was some sort of plan here, but I can’t even guess at what it was.
I’m really glad we waited until George was on the show before we covered this game. This whole section was that much more exciting with his commentary.
References:
The pot-smashing reminded me of this little gem. The random nonsense names that we were calling out during the invasion were from Mystery Science Theater 3000: Space Mutiny. I already linked it yesterday, but since we mentioned it again he’s another link to the SBH Critical Close-Up of Dark Souls. And as Josh said, we’ll be doing a live broadcast of Josh playing Dark Souls 2 tomorrow.
Link (YouTube) |
Right off the bat, George asks who Reginald Cuftbert is, so now might be a good time to bring newcomers up to speed. To ruin the joke by way of explaining itWhich is far better than you later ruining the joke yourself by discovering it isn’t very funny I’m going to need to do an exposition dump on you:
The Reginald Cuftbert joke(?) began back in 2010 during our Fallout 3 let’s play. (Yes, Spoiler Warning has been doing Let’s Plays since long before other, funnier people popularized the format.) It was an attempt to come up with the most lore-inappropriate name for our character. Since then we’ve continued the tradition of using the name in whatever form the game allows, which is usually “barely”. We now have about sixteen thousand times more memoryNot an exaggeration, assuming typical memory today is about 8GB and was 512k in 1990., but game designers are still using the 1990 approach to character names, where they don’t want to give you more than 10 bytes lest you run out of memory and crash to DOS.
We typically play Reginald as chaotic stupid. Partly for comedy, but also because it lets us see rarely experienced content and bugs.
Here is the SuperBunnyHop critical close-up of Dark Souls that we talked about in the show.
So my column this week was actually prompted by the fact that Resident Evil 4 recently got an HD re-release, and SuperBunnyHop did a retrospective on it.
But more importantly it’s prompted by the endless needling I get from Various Parties when I fail to like things. Or if I don’t like them enough. Or for the right reasons.
“It’s your own fault you’re bad at the game.”
Which doesn’t change that fact that some people really want to know how demanding a game is, and how punishing it is.
“It’s your own fault for not knowing the lore.”
Actually, it’s the storytellers job to make the story interesting for the audience. In any case, “This story is bad for newcomers” is valuable information for newcomers.
“You shouldn’t have played the game if you don’t like QTEs / morality systems / romance subplots / grinding.”
So what parts of the game is the critic allowed to critique? Using this logic, a game can only be reviewed by people who are already fans of it, and are only consumed by people who already know what they’re getting. Which means the fanboy is using reviews as as way of reinforcing their opinions, and basically declaring artistic reviews and consumer advice as invalid. Moreover, if I was supposed to know better than to play a game with [feature], how am I supposed to find out about [feature]? You’ve already said it’s wrong for critics to bring it up!
This is all a waste of time, of course. Fans will be fans. In fact, I predict reflexive defense of RE4 in response to my article about how reflexively defending things is terrible. There’s no cure.
Still, I can always hope to make a few converts.
Thanks so much to special guest George Weidman of SuperBunnyHop for joining in. He’s also going to be part of Spoiler Warning this week. If you’re going to check out his channel (which you should totally do) I highly recommend his video on Quiet Time in games, and if you’re obsessed with VR like I am then you’ll want to see his fairly thorough VR report from GDC.
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Hosts: Josh, Rutskarn, Chris, Mumbles, George Weidman (SuperBunnyHop), and Shamus.
Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #54: Witcher, HOT MEN, Wildstar”
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