https://youtu.be/UyI3IL46yq4
Telltale Games has put out amazing games in licensed universes such as The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us (which takes place in the Vertigo “Fables” universe), and Game of Thrones. Canonical games (or as close to thereabouts) that give you the opportunity to explore the universe and make choices in this universe and see how these choices inevitably play out.
It’s only on the second playthrough of any given game that you realize “huh, my choices didn’t really change what happened around me… they only changed how I *FELT* about the changes that happened around me.”
I’ll give an example. In one of the first chapters of first The Walking Dead game, you’re put into a situation where you have to pick one of two characters to save from the zombie horde. You can’t save both of them. You must pick.
After you pick, you have a short conversation with the survivor that helps you feel a little better while feeling a little guilty… and then, shortly after that, this character also dies.
On a gaming level, this makes sense. You don’t have to code for two skins or two voices for two different characters. On a personal gaming level, though, it helps create a bit of a sense of futility and nihilism that absolutely and totally fits the universe of The Walking Dead.
One of my favorite examples of a change that is meaningless on a game programming level but oh-so-meaningful on a personal level involves an interaction with a minor bad guy. In the video game, you are the protagonist and you have taken it upon yourself to help a 10 year old girl find her parents. Along the way, you encounter this particular bad guy who goes on to do some very bad things to friends of yours. Various things happen, tables get turned, and, next thing you know, you’re standing over him with a pitchfork while he gives you a monologue about the way the world works now. You are given the choice of whether to kill this bad, bad person with the pitchfork who has just given you this particular monologue.
Somewhat major spoilers follow:
Spear him or don’t? That’s the question. The first time I played through, I used the pitchfork and killed this bad, bad person who did bad, bad things to friends of mine. Immediately after I killed the guy, the little girl whom I was helping ran alongside of me and gasped loudly. I realized, in that very second, that I did not want to have had her see what I had done. I almost sprained my back in my haste to hit the power button. When I played through a second time, I chose to *NOT* kill the bad, bad person who did bad, bad things to friends of mine. And, moments later, a zombie ate him.
So this company that has made such wonderful games with (the illusion of) such wonderful choices is now putting together a Batman story.
OH.
MY.
GOSH.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]
Telltale games are pretty great!
The rest of this post is going to be super off topic because I am trying to diagnose a very strange chromium bug.
This site is a wordpress instance, correct? Does anyone know what differentiates it from a wordpress instance like this one? I can read all of the text on this site except the twitter inset and the names of commenters. I can also read text on youtube.com, newyorker.com, and on the site of a webcomic I read called erfworld. I can read no other website that I can quickly find (including facebook, the d20srd, the above-linked thingofthings, slate star codex, and another webcomic’s site and associated forum). I’m running chromium 52 on arch (with experimental), inside awesome wm on an otherwise bare X server. I’ve submitted a bug report to google, but this is bizarre. Any tech people have any idea what’s going on?Report
Last week sometime I was bored so I decided to fire up FTL. I discovered that I had unlocked the Mantis Cruiser Layout B, but I’d never played it. This starts with a four-person teleporter, no weapons, a drone control with a boarding drone and a defense drone and two Mantis crew. Been trying to beat the game on easy ever since. Yesterday I got the Big Boss down to two health before he blew me up. So. Close.Report
So, while playing with bits and pieces that will eventually go into the Prototype Bedside Appliance™, I came across a streaming web service that bills itself as “true oldies”. After two hours of that running in the background while I struggled with code, I have to admit that at some point in every single song I had a “oh, I remember that” moment. No repeats. No commercials. How the hell is anyone supposed to make money against that kind of competition?Report