{"id":31281,"date":"2016-03-24T19:20:47","date_gmt":"2016-03-25T00:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=31281"},"modified":"2016-03-24T19:22:52","modified_gmt":"2016-03-25T00:22:52","slug":"soma-ep2-the-save-sphincter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=31281","title":{"rendered":"SOMA EP2: The Save Sphincter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/u26yLYDHaH4\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=u26yLYDHaH4'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s talk about these health sphincters. I think it&#8217;s really telling that 60% of the Spoiler Warning cast all came to the exact same wrong conclusion, and saw the healing icon as a D-pad symbol. <\/p>\n<p>There are a lot of problems here. One is that you don&#8217;t have a health bar, so you can&#8217;t see any change when the device heals you. The only way you can tell if you&#8217;re injured is if the screen is glitching, which:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>At this early stage, it&#8217;s pretty unlikely that you&#8217;ve been injured. So you&#8217;re at full health when you encounter the first couple of healing stations. But even if you have been injured&#8230;\n<li>At this point in the game, you don&#8217;t have any idea why your view would be &#8220;malfunctioning&#8221;. If I&#8217;m hurt, shouldn&#8217;t the screen turn red? If I&#8217;m going insane, shouldn&#8217;t I be seeing shadows?  What does this glitch mean? Am I hurt, insane, or is this a stylized videogame-y way of telling me &#8220;monsters are near&#8221;? Or is this just a special effect just to set a &#8220;techno-future&#8221; mood, like bloom lighting is used to make things &#8220;dreamy&#8221;?\n<\/ol>\n<p>After using the device Simon remarks that he feels better. But again, if he wasn&#8217;t injured you might assume he&#8217;s talking about his emotional state. And that&#8217;s assuming the player chooses to interact with this huge writhing black sphincter dripping with scary black goo. It&#8217;s reasonable to imagine most players would stay clear of that thing. There&#8217;s certainly no in-universe reason for timid Simon to go jamming his digits into it.<\/p>\n<p>Later revelations clear up what this thing is and what it does (sort of) but by then you&#8217;ve passed a half dozen of these gizmos. That&#8217;s pretty late in the game for it to finally get around to making the mechanics clear.<\/p>\n<p>So the player doesn&#8217;t know what this thing is, or what it does, and it&#8217;s directly connected to player health, which is another system they don&#8217;t yet understand yet. The icon it uses is easily confused with standard interface symbols, which only makes things worse. I suppose it would help if the symbol was a fat green or red plus sign, and not the broken, narrow white symbol we see here. <\/p>\n<p>The only reason this doesn&#8217;t ruin the game is because SOMA is usually pretty easy (especially in these early stages) and the player can still muddle through without understanding the health mechanics.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not a serious problem with the game, but it is a pretty good illustration of a situation where things that seem obvious to the developer can be badly misinterpreted by the audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) Let&#8217;s talk about these health sphincters. I think it&#8217;s really telling that 60% of the Spoiler Warning cast all came to the exact same wrong conclusion, and saw the healing icon as a D-pad symbol. There are a lot of problems here. One is that you don&#8217;t have a health bar, so you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[527],"class_list":["post-31281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-soma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}