We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I started a gamedev blog but it’s only a linkdump until I start actually working on the game, and considering there is like a week before classes start, it might remain that way for a few months longer.

I do this because this has come recommended to me (as a prospective game industry employee) as a way to demonstrate that I am “on top of things” and know to follow the same news the professionals in the industry follow.

I don't have a devblog for my game because I was too lazy to start making a game

I tried out The Sims 3.

To try The Sims 3 is to begin to play “Armchair CEO of EA” in your head.

I should really get an MBA and extensive business contacts; they’re looking for an actual CEO right now, y’know?

let's play divekick

i want to play divekick

when is divekick

Also I've played the Phoenixes and the Wrights and love them and I'm really excited that two more are coming to the region

Please elaborate.

Well, it is a horror beyond words. The crux of it is... Steve Jobs insisted on being a CEO not necessarily because he liked the dreadful day to day stuff looking at your stock reports and sitting board meetings (maybe he did; I don’t know), or because he could be an imperious bastard (sometimes he was); he did it because he didn’t like anyone telling him he couldn’t work in the trenches participating in product design and having the final say. So for a lot of gamers, seeing EA make a lot of screwups like what you get with a lot of their games is when you see someone fumbling at something simple very badly and you want to go “no! here, let me show you”, but you’re not in the kind of position where that wouldn’t be pretty darn rude.

So let me attempt to resurrect the mess of a post I gave up on:

SpoilerShow

It’s a game of a different stripe, sure. I can see why it’s popular (who else really makes a game like it, and also has such extensive content that you can only put out if you devote an entire division to it?), and a part of it was even enjoyable. It has satisfying answers to the big questions of life, like why am I not a celebrity? Why am I not one of those executives who apparently have skills so rare they need a full cool millions in “compensation” (and not salary or hourly rate like the rest of us schlubs) and a golden parachute; is it because I have not figured out some sort of life cheat code, or is it because I need to put in more hours at work? Why can you not just cause one such person to fall in love with you by showering affection on them at a chance meeting? (Hey, I said satisfying, not “right”; they are, without exception, the wrong answers.)

Yet to even get to this point, I don’t see how to reconcile this bug-ridden, slow-loading, freeze-crazy experience (that does NOT autosave, and in fact saving causes some issues, too) with the ridiculous amount of business EA gets for it. That’s where EA comes into mind, because there’s an inescapable logo involved every darn time the programs involved get in the way.

See, you have to put up with a mountain of UX issues just to start playing. I shall detail them in as much excruciating detail as I can recall just to underscore the point, but feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph if you don’t want to have the frustration rub off.

To redeem the codes from the Humble Origin Bundle (no worries, not a single red cent goes to EA for this sale)—I was directed to, surprisingly, not Origin, even though I needed an Origin account to get started. To get started, you have to register for The Sims 3 Community, enter the 20-character alphanumeric serial code for the base game (you can’t just paste it all at once; you have to type it out). Then, if you would like to register the two expansions you get, you have to navigate a menu “My Page > My Account > Register a Game” and enter those 20-character codes. By hand. These expansions will sit in your Origin library as “games” even though they only need to be considered separately for installation purposes; you can only run The Sims 3, those other packages are not standalones, even though one of them is just a “stuff” pack and doesn’t even affect gameplay. But wait! Want to install the “add-on pack” you got with the bundle, too? Then just go to “My Page > My Account > Redeem a Code”, and type in its 16-character code! Why they cannot simply make the codes such that which kind of code it is is computer-detectable is a great mystery. And why they cannot simply make a single, bundleriffic code is a greater mystery. So now that you’ve purchased The Sims 3 and they know which copy you bought, it’s time to open Origin and install these suckers. So you go to Origin, you download them through the system, and you just wait however long that takes. Now they want you to do a separate install step. Wait, why does it flash my code at me again? Well, they use ordinary installers, instead of taking advantage of the fact that they made you install a content distribution thing on your hard drive already. And you have to run these installers separately (good thing Apple’s default installers lets you just paste the code this time), when Origin already knows what code I was using, because it’s in their system, using their registration methods!. So anyway, they could at least create the illusion that Origin just installs it for you when it’s done, if they really wanted to, without making the customer take care of the code. But wait, there’s more! Want to get the game’s latest available updates? (Yes, yes you do; you can’t download things like that add-on pack without them.) Well, Origin doesn’t handle that. You start up the launcher, and that tells you what the latest version is, and attempt to download it for you. It will probably fail; you should have just scoured the internet for the manual fix (but where does it tell you that?). In the meantime, Steam has gone beyond the crass need for such user-intensive installation methods, and possesses the ability to patch installed games in-place, thus placing such abilities outside the realm of “merely theoretical”; Origin acts like a digital-download website instead of like an application you installed on your computer and gave your admin password to. Anyway, once you’ve done all that, things should work; maybe there are some downloads you’ll want, but those won’t break. Oh, and there was one step I couldn’t figure out where to slip into the above dialogue; now here’s an Origin-al sin for ya: I already had an account, but they wanted to press the issue of a “security question” selection (it wasn’t previously required). The selection consists entirely of things that don’t apply to me, or are things that some people who aren’t me can answer, rendering them entirely insecure. But if someone has to supply a false answer to a security question, it’s just a second password to forget, rendering them entirely useless for the purpose of regaining/changing your password (yes, you have to answer the question to change your password).

Ways to simplify the above is left as an exercise to the reader (doesn’t need to be perfect, to be honest; it just doesn’t need to take like an essay’s worth of text to explain the process). Needless to say, they’re not getting their kaizen on over there.

I uninstalled The Sims 3 without accomplishing hardly anything in-game, because it always freezes when you start getting somewhere, or it’s always off doing stuff like getting your sims stuck in elevators and requiring you to cheat to get them out, and somehow I doubt that whatever reward lies at whatever end could make up for the frequency of these things. Six hours of playing, three crash/freezes; one of the freezes rendered my system unresponsive (good thing I had sshd running, too bad for people who don’t have a second computer and don’t know how to use a command line, huh?). No autosave at any point. Now I may be talking crazy-talk here, but I’m pretty sure they pay a number of people over there whose entire job is to make sure these incidents don’t happen too often, and that if they do, they pay other people whose jobs involve making sure it happens as infrequently as possible, and that if they still do, they pay other people whose jobs are to at least design something so you don’t lose hours of play just because you didn’t want to sit around for a minute watching it save very slowly, because those people are now going to watch the game load very slowly and re-do everything they were doing if they want to jump back in.

Where I’m going with this:

For a few years now, this is the experience that they’ve been asking people to pay for. Now, one of the suits (partially in charge of running the company on autopilot while they look for a new CEO), in light of things like the “worst company in America” awards*, recently expressed that they’re trying to change things up over there, but personally I’m skeptical if they can pull it off. Being in the the business of bigness is really not helping them accomplish the mission, either.

So, not to say someone could fix their woes with a magic wand, but that’s where we get back to the musing begun by the gameplay of The Sims: it sure would be nice to be the CEO for a year and walk away with the kind of money they paid the last one (just short of $6M a year), never minding that I don’t have that skill set; that kind of money is not rich rich, but it’s still enough that I probably wouldn’t ever need to work again.

And that’s part of the appeal of The Sims; it’s this near-utopic world without the danger (or critical thought) of all these “isms”, or all the needs for personal improvements (which are never really on clear, set paths) that make our real world kind of tough to deal with. Even getting robbed is not so bad: the police show up pretty quickly if you wake up in time to make a call, and it only ruins your day for one day. And besides that, you’ll just buy a new one if it does get stolen; jobs are easy to come by. If you end up becoming a celebrity, the paparazzi aren’t quite so invasive as they can be in reality such that even a committed pacifist might want to punch their lights out (no, in fact, you can make a pretty penny suing them). No fear of much worse happening, besides dying in a house fire or drowning thanks to MouseCursorGod being clueless or cruel. Nice world. Bit of a Stepford world, though.

* I don’t give it much credence because I understand elementary statistics and the nature of Internet polling, but some people like bringing it up, apparently.

e: holy mackerel that is kind of long

Exactly that; it’s the same sort of tap into how a number of people watch reality TV, or wish they were rich/famous/smart/beautiful/powerful all the time but miiiight be better off not chasing after that. Psychological research has largely converged on the idea that once you’ve got basic needs secure, the judging and the wishing makes people much happier than the worldly concerns ever will. Once you reach the top in The Sims? Basically, that “wishing” stage is over, and you gotta find something else to do. You could, however, just enjoy watching the interpersonal relationships and stuff play out. People get a kick out of that, too, the whole “playing with dolls” aspect of it. You can spin some yarns out of that, certainly. And finally, you have a number of people whose enjoyment is in introducing whatever chaos they can contrive to just such a system (Pleasantville: THE GAME). Of course, I figure most players enjoy some mix of these aspects in exploring the game.

Well, there are some aspects of humor in the game, too. Maxis-style humor was always of the tongue-in-cheek sort; a “Daredevil” sim takes an Extreme Nap instead of a Nap, and an Evil character will Donate Money to Undermine Charity. Doesn’t change much about the game, it’s just a chuckley sort of thing.

I see parallels to that appeal in other genres, too; MMORPG devs (for subscription-based themepark-style games especially) have what they call “content churn”. They’re always trying to satisfy the people who run through and try to experience everything the game has; if the developers don’t do this, they’re out of a job because they have all those level-capped players quitting in droves. But then you have the role-players, and people like them, who use the game as a sort of glorified chat room, and to these, most of the game is just decor, even if they do like to go see the content, too. They don’t generally quit just because the game ran out of things to do; there will always be talking to do.

Me, I get my enjoyment out of overthinking things, I guess. I’m not very good at video games. I’m just a dabbler. An X-TREEEME dabbler.

In the Sims 1, I really liked slowly upgrading my house.

Well, it’s a meta-joke. The Evil sim does all the same things a Good one does, just... evil.

A lot of Maxis games have (really weak) jokes available as a cheat code. The joke must be that they bothered to put it in.

I think there are as many actually funny games out there as there are games with actually good storytelling. It's just that most writing for games sucks regardless of whether it's serious storytelling or comedy, and (probably because they know their target audience?) game designers tend towards dark humor a lot more than lelz and fun.
Pretty recently there's been the Portals, Fallout and Borderlands (at least as far as I've heard), Monkey Island, Psychonauts, No More Heroes, and TF2.
Which is a sad and short list but probably as long as the list of games with decent dramatic storytelling.

There are plenty of ways for a game to be funny, writing's only the most obvious. Rayman Origins always has my friends and I roaring with laughter and there's not a damn line of dialogue in it. The Saints Row series is also fairly hilarious without drifting into the darker humors. Rayman relies on lighthearted aesthetic and slapstick while Saints Row focuses more on parody and ribbing of more serious games.

why is Monkey Island a recent game (your list is 90% PC games? I guess that's just from your own experience)
All the Mario RPG games have good comedic writing (actually I don't know about the one with that puppet guy in because I didn't play that, I mean Mario and Luigi/Paper Mario)
Bastion has its amusing moments, Okami can be pretty funny too, Magicka is a slapstick game although much of the written jokes aren't as good
There's a lot more than that

I think the list is a lot bigger than you're giving it credit for, the ones on your list are quite often full of "Dark Humour" rather than "Lelz and Fun", it seems like you're falling into the same trap yourself through the weird gamers aversion to brightly coloured things

I forgot about Bastion, yeah, that was good
never played any kind of Mario RPG, so I wouldn't know about those
In general I have played quite a small number of games, and the majority of those were plot-minimal (e.g. Zelda, Pikmin, Civilization)
I was trying to make the point that there are actually are an awful lot of good games with humourous writing. I just left a short list because I only wanted to bother remembering things I've played (or seen played) in the past year.
Personally I really like cute games, but I haven't played any that were all that funny? Zelda has its moments but the overall tone of the game is more wide-eyed childhood hopefulness than humour.

I remember Ezlo from the Minish cap being more entertaining than your average Zelda companion.

Ezlo (and Linebeck) were what I was thinking of when I said "Zelda has its moments"
LoZ has really top-notch writing all around*, including humor, but nevertheless it is not what I would call a "comedy series"

*well most of them do

Socrates Jones tackles the important questions: How can deer possibly steal jobs? Are there limits on the extent of smiting? And is morality found in the circumference of the moon?

The joke is that he's an accountant. It's every joke.

The joke is that he's an accountant. It's every joke.

NONSENSE

one of the jokes was that Kant thought that facial hair was a universal maxim due to its proliferation and promptly adopted his own

hey supes was talking about pocket fighter earlier people might be interested in this game at the very start of its kickstarter

Ahhh, who else remembers the extra case they put on the DS version? I don't think I've ever been more nervous in my life, working my way lead after lead, backtracking to scene after scene, listening to that MUSIC ACCOMPANYING THE GODDAMN BLUE BADGER AHHHGGHHGH...

Gonna say, it was pretty much the most exhilarating case I've ever played. It was long, but finishing it was just - so worth it!

Sorry, I guess I just wanted to talk about how ridiculously fun that case was.

---

Also the Sims 3 is best when you install it from disc and don't patch it or add new expansions or install Origin. Then it actually works.

so, basically, removing all the EA from it

that and your creepy vampire sex dungeon

Oh hey, this looks pretty cool. Digging the art style and the odd SF/fantasy setting.



It's billed as a "combination roguelike and tower defense", which are two of the buzzwordiest terms in indie games today, but I'll withhold my judgment until I actually try the thing. In theory is sounds cool - I'd imagine you're trying to explore deeper and deeper into the catacombs while simultaneously trying to keep your ship safe?

The game the setting is based on, Endless Space, also looks neat. I've wanted to try it for a while.

Personally, I thought it was a good tale, but it did drag on a bit. Being longer than the other cases and adding the DS features also felt a bit strange.

SpoilerShow

Too bad about Lana, though, I mean daaaang.

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And morality is not found in the circumference of the moon.

I don’t argue the point that there is a culture problem, but I would like to dispute the notion that “a professional writer” is a cure for what ails us.

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Video game writing is just plain different in some ways, and many forms of it are just not conducive to the nature of fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious humor. Games involve a lot of repetition; personally, I consider cyclical patterns to be fundamental to the storytelling of games more so than a lot of theorists seem to suppose. Yet humor involves a lot of subverted expectation (which is quite possibly fundamental to what humor is, depending on the theory). These two things are not completely antithetical, to be sure, but they are also in obvious conflict.

I cannot tell you how many projects have the brilliant idea to bring on a bright-eyed acclaimed Hollywood writer absolutely convinced that this is gonna be totally awesome, we’re going to revolutionize that shitty game writing your industry pumps out. It seems that most of them come out of it a little bit older and wiser, finding it hard because it is hard even for a great writer, unless they were making the highly linear kind of story where they might as well have written a movie. So I cannot tell you; however many it’s been, it’s that many too many.

After all, if you’re trying to lay off the cutscenes like you should, you are no longer writing an experience that you can send through a studio and will go in a certain order from beginning to end in a definite amount of time, barring something unusual like Clue’s multiple endings. No, every point at which you give a player leeway to choose the ordering of actions, you have more possibilities, more orderings to things than you can possibly anticipate due to combinatorial explosion of the different game elements.* This is why humorous adventure games have a lot of “brick jokes”—it is an acknowledgement that outside of what amounts to simple dialogue and cutscenes, the player dictates the pace of the story, and trying to account for every possibility is a fool’s errand. The player doesn’t need to be smarter than you to do something you don’t have an answer for, so when you write for games, your writing tends to be a key part of the game’s design, in a way. Thus, you are not only playing at writing; you are also playing at something not unlike computer programming (and a part that many programmers find difficult, at that).

I dare say some of these writers we already have are unsung heroes and the reasons you don’t see very many of them really bring the funny or whatever is because it can be a much more complicated task at points than writing normally, and writing normally ain’t no cakewalk neither. And no matter how good a joke is, it won’t survive the onslaught of repetition that gameplay tends to bring, and if you aren’t repeating, it’s probably because what you actually wanted to make was a longer film than anyone’d sit around for. I mean, it could be that you invented an AI that can spin a good yarn, but I’d believe that when I see it.

Maybe this is getting rambly. No, it is getting rambly, and I am seconds away from nodding off here (assuming I don’t do something foolish and get a “second wind” and start playing those things I preordered that decided they’d come out the weekend before classes start). The thing is, yeah, this is an industry where many potential hires out of college have to be told, “Before you put it in the portfolio, ask yourself if someone who saw it would think you’re a serial killer as a result.” But personally, I don’t blame the market or the writers so much. I think the task is really a tall order; you are better serviced in general in games by having a humorous outlook than by outrageously good comedy.

* If in a particular timeframe you permit for e_i events in each of n sequences, there are (Σe_i)!/Π(e_i!) possible orderings, where of these events Σ means sum from i = 1 to n and Π means product over the same, and bear in mind that the timeframe is not at your command. (An example for the laity: if you had The Three Trials in your game, with three steps for each performed in order, and it lets you ping-pong between the Trials as you like, then this means there are (3+3+3)!/(3!*3!*3!)=9!/216=1680 possible orders these tasks can be done, and any writer who might, for instance, try to give a personalized touch to a large number of these individual branches in the face of such potential numbers is not being their own best friend, despite this sort of exploration being much of the fun in dialogue-heavy games). Oh, at this point I’d namedrop Virtue’s Last Reward for being a good example of taking tree-like story branching and really running with it, except I’ve never played it; but it does go to show it’s not a horrible idea, to do dialogue this way... maybe a painful one. And then there is also the other kind of combinatorial explosion that leads to “I can’t use these things together”, the war of every item against every item.

Flavor text doesn't seem like something that'd be hard to do, and done well it adds personality. Team Fortress and Sequence have their irreverent humor to set the tone; Diablo, Warcraft and the like have lore that fleshes out the world; and MagicTG has both, often at the same time. It helps color the player's impression of the game, without impacting the game itself* much.

Come to think, I don't think I've run into bad flavor text. I can think of ways it could be used poorly or inappropriately,** but the worst that I've seen is merely informative-- without flavor, but not tasteless, as it were.


*Whatever that means. I could, f'rinst, compare flavor text to art style-- can add flavor, affects the game's tone, fleshes impressions-- but art is necessarily more intrusive than flavor text and may be considered moreso part of "the game itself."***

**Contains offensive or irrelevant content, is too long, is put in places it need not be...

***Whatever that means.