T w e n t y S i d e d

In this episode I mentioned An anthropological introduction to YouTube. I said this about it in 2008, and today I still tell people it’s the best thing on YouTube. It’s a presentation given to the Library of Congress in 2008 by anthropologist Mike Wesch. It’s a study of the way YouTube (and to a lesser extent, the net in general) has both shaped our existing cultures and arguably formed a completely new culture. I find it captivating.

We also mentioned PewDiePie, who is insanely popular but also intensely reviled. My spontaneous estimate of our fanbases was roughly correct. His typical video gets in the neighborhood of 14 to 20 million, and the average Spoiler Warning hits in the 1.4 to 2 thousand range. It’s easy to get bitter about that if you look at view numbers as some sort of public evaluation of your work and worth, so I try to avoid thinking of it in those terms. I like what our show does, and there aren’t many shows like it. More people like Katy Perry than They Might be Giants, more people like Transformers than Primer, and more people like Call of Duty than System Shock 2. In an ideal world, we’d all be just delighted to have our little shared communities and not envy the larger ones.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I don’t have much to say about this part of the game that didn’t end up in the episode, so let me back up and talk about the section from last week when I was absent.

The section where Lara is caught in the rapids and has to dodge the hazards in the water was really hard for me. I just couldn’t see the obstacles mixed in with all the foaming water. By the time I spotted threats it was too late to avoid them. I kind of had to brute-force it by just memorizing a particular line. I think it took me five tries to get through it.

I have to hand it to the game for being really authentic for just how confusing it would be to find yourself in that kind of predicament, although it didn’t make for very interesting or fun gameplay.

Also, the debate about whether the death animations are appropriate or needlessly gruesome is kind of interesting to me. The first time I saw Lara get spiked by rusty metal I was shocked and nauseated. But I figured that was probably the response the designers intended. But the fifth time I saw it I began wondering just what the hell was wrong with the designers. The shock value was gone and replaced with a general sense of disgust for the work itself.

A movie can get away with having a single gory death. But if they repeat the same gory death over and over from different camera angles and in slow-motion, then suddenly our perception of the gore changes. Suddenly it feels like the story is just an excuse to put nasty stuff onscreen to satisfy the filmmaker’s sick fetish for the macabre. Repetition carries meaning and we respond to it.

But in the context of this game, the player can experience that sort of unsavory repetition through failure. I think it would be good for the designer to keep this in mind when designing these deaths. If anything, we should have been spared the full gore show for subsequent failures, maybe with a slam cut to black just before impact. The player will remember the earlier death and will probably flinch at the memory without needing to show them the full scene again.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

It’s hard for me to judge Tomb Raider too harshly with regards to tone, because I’m guilty of the same thing. In The Witch Watch I set out to make comedy adventure like the Let’s Plays I do, and right away it drifted into standard adventure. Progress is slow on my next book because I made the same mistake: I tried to play it all for laughs and ended up drifting towards a more serious tone.

Tone is the one thing you don’t want to get wrong, because it sets up the expectations of the audience. Indiana Jones can do things that John Mcclane* can’t, and John Mcclane can do things that Lt. Horatio Caine would never get away with, and Lt. Caine does stuff that would seem ridiculous if attempted by Andy Taylor. The tone of the story sets up how much fidelity to real-world logic we should expect to see, and it also sets up what sorts of divergences we will tolerate. Andy Taylor can disarm and subsequently redeem a gunman with nothing more than an earnest smile and some folk storytelling. Indy can take abuse that would kill earnest Andy ten times over. We accept these worlds on their own terms, as long as they stick to their tone.

* John Mcclane in the first Die Hard movie. The character has suffered from power creep since then.

I think this is a big part of what went wrong with the end of Mass Effect 3: The first game set up a Star Trek tone, and the audience rebelled when the third game became Starship Troopers. People that played ME3 first didn’t have those same expectations. Tonal dissonance is also a big problem for the Fable series, where you have this storybook world and plot inhabited by Sin City style grimdark murdering sadists, like a couple of Game of Throne villains running around inside the world of The Princess Bride. It just doesn’t work.

Almost all of my gripes with Tomb Raider trace back to this tonal problem. It’s a shame, and it’s something I hope the get right in the inevitable sequel. Also, I can’t help but wonder which tone will win out. Will the next game feel like Jack London or Frank Miller? Or will it split the difference?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.