Telling Stories: Adult themes and porn
Let’s do something that I couldn’t really do back when I was writing Storyboard; let’s talk about sex.
I’ve touched on the subject before, but only broadly. It’s hard not to. But it’s also the elephant in the room, something that’s hard to talk about without it seeming as if that’s all you want to talk about. Thanks to the people who use ERP as a free license to be as screamingly creepy as they could never be in the real world, no one wants to talk about it, because who in the world wants to be associated with that?
But it’s part of the territory. Hell, it’s part of the community, something that it’s more than likely you’ve worked around even if you didn’t know it before. So let’s talk about it, because it’s important and relevant, moreso than the roleplaying community as a whole likes to acknowledge. Despite rumors, being involved in ERP does not automatically mean you are a supercreep, nor is it an activity solely reserved for people using it as a surrogate relationship. Heck, you’ve quite possibly brushed up against it yourself.
Demo Driver 8: Eschalon Book 1 (#224)
“This,” he said, “is going to be one of those games that’s like a roguelike with its nitpicking attention to detail but without its relentless powergaming to take the edge off, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so,” replied the narrator. “You might want to get a drink.”
The trouble with talking about games that are deliberate throwbacks to an earlier period of gaming is that critiquing them is like critiquing nostalgia. You can tell me time and again that gaming has moved on a great deal since Kirby’s Adventure or Super Metroid, for example, and you’d be entirely correct in saying so, but that’s not going to make me like either game less. Handing someone a title like Eschalon Book 1 is like being asked to tell someone why their fond memories of an earlier age are wrong or confirm that they’re totally right and games suck now.
There’s your salt to munch on whilst I tell you that this is exactly the sort of game that made me reluctant to get into PC gaming for a really long time. Much like there’s a spectrum of racing games you can make, there is a spectrum of different RPGs you can make on a computer, and Eschalon falls firmly on the side of the camp that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get into. The reason being that I was a teenager, I played Dungeons & Dragons, and I would prefer to avoid this attempt to replicate that experience.
A virtual gun and good entertainment (or why you still need to play Spec Ops: The Line)
The heavenward spire never looked so foreboding.
There’s something unsettling in playing Spec Ops: The Line, long before its major twist really falls upon you. Oh, sure, it plays like a conventional third-person shooter as you storm along and gleefully pull the trigger on your gun, but right from the start there’s something unsettling therein, something that gnaws at you. The environments are too claustrophobic, the dialogue too close to the edge of snapping and growling, every moment too pitched and agitated for what’s going on. Sudden slowdowns punctuate combat as you kill people, seemingly without reason, the camera and the events around you drifting slower as if to give you just enough time to really think about the life you ended.
Of course, at this point you don’t need me to tell you what the deal is with the game. It’s been raved about critically, praised as a deconstruction of the real-is-brown military gun-porn shooter by more or less every outlet in existence. Sales weren’t what they could have been, but it succeeded at its goal. But how much merit does it still have? When you know the gut punch that it’s aiming for you, is it still as effective? Does the game still have a point when the only audience that’s going to remember it is the audience that has the least need of it?
Challenge Accepted: The virtues of easy
Why play this instead of something harder? I can think of dozens of reasons.
If you can’t understand why someone would want to play an easy game, I don’t think you understand why people play video games at all. I’m not saying you have to want to play one, I’m saying you have to understand why someone will do that. No, saying “because they can’t play well enough to be at the top” does not qualify as understanding.
I like talking about challenge in games – a lot – but I also can’t stand the chest-pounding portion of the general gaming audience who seems to collectively believe that if you’re not turning every game into an arduous challenge then you’re obviously unworthy of purchasing any more games over the course of your life. As if there was no way to enjoy a game that tried just being easy, as if there was nothing to be derived from a game that’s not terribly deep, as if there was no modulation or middle ground between people who enjoy challenges and those that enjoy challenges. Or, for that matter, as if every game wasn’t easy in the right light.
Spoiler warning: all of the above are true.
Where did World of Warcraft go wrong?
I should not be looking at an expansion filled with draenei and not be excited. This is literally everything I’ve ever wanted.
Something is rotten in the state of Azeroth, and it has been for a while.
The problem of talking about World of Warcraft‘s decline is that no one is interested in doing so. The game’s fans are eager to point out that the game still has an impressive number of subscribers rather than talking about the fact that, on average, the game has been losing more than a million subscribers per year since the launch of Cataclysm. The other side of the coin likes to forecast the game’s death, neglecting to acknowledge that even if the game keeps bleeding off subscribers at this rate it’s got several more years of life left in it while discounting spikes.
But there’s a frank discussion to be had, one that doesn’t invest itself in hyperbole, and it’s obvious that the game is on a downward arc. Over the past four years (Cataclysm launched at the very tail end of year six) the game has lost an extraordinary number of subscribers. Its growth has stalled. This is a stark reversal when the game was in an upward trend for the first six years of its lifespan. Why is that? What’s changed its fortunes so thoroughly? I wonder about that a lot, and I think a lot of it comes down to learning the wrong lessons from its height.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 