Telling Stories: Serial roleplaying or building events
One of the things that has made my wife and I both develop an affection for Netflix-produced shows is the simple fact that these shows don’t have to work like traditional television. They can break a cardinal rule that’s long been accepted as fact – they can be completely non-serial.
Most shows have to be designed so that you can sit down and watch with a minimum of overall knowledge. This isn’t always a bad thing; after all, Batman: The Animated Series ran on the idea of boiling down the characters to their essences, and it was one of the best animated shows ever. But when you get shows like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, you feel the writers struggling against the restrictions imposed by a format that relied upon standalone episodes. It’s kind of a miracle that Lost ran as long as it did while putting up a wall for any new viewers.
There’s something of the same issue when it comes to roleplaying. You’ve got a tug-of-war between the serial version or a more constant continuity. The trouble is that one is a lot more rewarding than the other, and the benefits of serial roleplaying are mostly conceptual.
Tough acts to follow
So far I’ve been having a blast, and that’s usually my first goal with any game in the franchise, so mission accomplished.
The Sims 4 came out just a little while ago, and I like it. It’s had some stuff snipped from it and some other things added in; conversations feel a lot more organic, for one thing, and relationships are thankfully measured along two axes rather than one. It’s solid, in other words. But its biggest competitor is hanging over its head in the form of the third game in the franchise.
I’m not really interested in talking here about what features were removed for this incarnation of the game; by and large, the cuts feel like they were good removals considering what got more development as a result. But I found myself thinking how difficult a road the game has ahead of it based not upon its own merits but simply by virtue of being new. There’s no reason a new game with a new engine can match up to what a predecessor with five years of development has accomplished, and yet it has to do exactly that. It’s a tough act to follow.
Defiance and the dancing bear
Let’s all pause for a moment to appreciate the show giving us another non-English curse word to pepper speech with while avoiding strict censor guidelines.
The dancing bear joke really isn’t; it’s more of a punchline in search of a setup. It’s simple enough, though. If you see a bear dancing in the circus, you’re not concerned with his form. You’re just impressed that the people training him got him to dance at all. Sure, it’s mostly just shuffling back and forth, but does it really matter as long as it counts as dancing?
A lot of media has the dancing bear problem. Strictly speaking, for instance, it doesn’t matter if the Transformers cartoons are any good, it just matters whether or not they sell toys. Skylanders toys could come to life at night and try to kill your pets, but the important thing is that they tie into the video game. You get the idea. When you’ve got any piece of media tying into something else, you’re starting out with a dancing bear.
Defiance falls into that category quite handily. It’s a show that’s made to tie into an online game running at the same time, with the promise that the two will feed into one another – events in the game are reflected by the show, and vice versa. The problem being, of course, that a show not aimed at supporting a merchandising line can’t survive for long on novelty. It’s not enough to be a dancing bear here; you have to be a bear that turns out to be a pretty good dancer.
Challenge Accepted: Select difficulty
This is not the vacation I had been expecting.
A curious thing happened on one of my playthroughs of Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner. I realized that the difficulty I had things set on was actually making my life harder, despite the fact that it was down at Easy.
I’d beaten the game before, and this was just meant as a fun run using the relentlessly overpowered final form that can then be used to play through the game. What made things difficult is that there’s a boss where your goal is to parry her attacks, then grab her machine and delete a virus that’s manipulating her controls. Hack at her actual mech too many times and it’s game over. Between the difficulty setting and my machine, every time I would accidentally hit her instead of parrying her attack, she’d lose a good third of her health – compared to a normal playthrough, where a few misses were unfortunate, but you had to be really trying to kill her.
This was an isolated incident, but it also serves as an interesting introduction to how difficulty levels alter games, sometimes unsuccessfully. While the dream of multiple difficulty levels is that the same content can provide entertainment for different sorts of players, in practice it doesn’t often work out that way.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 