The Ludi Bin

Admiration Point post-mortem

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 03:09:00 +0000

Admiration Point (itch.io; IFComp 2022) is a "FEELINGSART" that I created at the beginning of this year. I will be discussing my design decisions in-depth. There will be spoilers.

I mentioned in my post-game notes that Admiration Point is inspired by real events. Out of a desire to protect the innocent, I changed a lot of details. But the core anxieties of the many feelings involved in an unwanted work crush--admiration, envy, intellectual kinship, guilt, excitement, and anxiety--are still very much present in the work. I used my writing as therapy to process feelings I felt a lot of shame for. But after writing my shame out of my system, I realized that there is a reason we feel shame for some emotions, because we are not supposed to talk about them. But feeling like I can't talk about my emotions seems to only bring them to a boil! Writing this game was writing therapy for me. I am happy that my temporary insanity has passed and that I managed to sublimate those feelings into something other people have been excited to read.

What seemed successful:

the word "anti-romance"
the game was not "just" about an unwanted workplace crush; it also had an interesting setting
a good variety of choices that helped people feel like they were role-playing

What was not as successful

it was too difficult to get endings 1 or 2
I should have asked my testers to test this more specifically
some people didn't like the high level of detail in the book excerpts

I'm going to go into more detail about 1) why I chose for players to be able to decide what to do with their feelings if it didn't affection their future choices and 2) what was wrong with my stat system.

Deciding what to do with your feelings

Your decision about what to do with your crush does not influence your future choice options. So why is it a choice? Deciding to avoid/use/wreck with your feelings is something any person with unwanted feelings will have to decide at some point. Maybe not everyone will sit down and deliberately decide what to do with their feelings, but I wanted the player to make a role-playing decision. In order to play a role, you need to be able to actually choose to act according to that role. I could have eliminated choices to flirt with Sean after choosing the "avoid" route. But choosing to avoid someone, or live with your feelings for them, or to pursue them, is a decision that must be made over and over.

The decision of what to do with your feelings does affect some of the game's evaluations of your decisions to you. Each ending has a little sentence or two commenting on how/if you fulfilled your goal. The game's reflective text is also affected. For example, after the Handmaid's Tale exhibit, you think about how Sean mentioned your work. If you chose to avoid your feelings, your inner voice will say "You hate that you like that"; otherwise it says "Finally!" with some text about how go an listen to his voiceover and admire his work.

Why didn't the stat system work?

My stat system worked in the sense of having players feel like their decisions affected... something. Just like a real weird relationship with your coworker where you start gaslighting yourself into thinking that it's all in your head, but then you can feel the sunlight of their affection, and you feel that maybe you weren't insane that whole time? The spiral effectively conveyed Maria's obsession, but the other variables didn't help players figure out what choices to make in order to see more of the story.

Many players missed the more "final" endings, endings 1 and 2. If you got ending 4 or 5, there is still a LOT of the game you can play. There are some great scenes after ending 3, too. But in order to collaborate with Sean and avoid ending 3, you have to ask him to apply for the grant with you and he has to agree. For Sean to agree to collaborate, his affection for you must be over 4 (which you can check in the alt text of the stats images), and you have to not kiss him. One easy way to get your affection over four is to have lunch with him after he helps you with the mommy blogger motion capture, but he will only have lunch with you if his affection is over 3, or if his alert is lower than 2. You can also increase his affection by having his book in your office when he visits it, by emailing him about Loopscape, or by having dinner with him and the team after the Handmaid's Tale exhibit. (N.B. After writing this postmortem, I subtracted one from the affection thresholds for the lunch scene and the grant collaboration.)

Endings in Admiration Point

I wanted to make it a little difficult! I wanted to give players the feeling of threading the needle between making friends with Sean and making their attraction too obvious. While it's traditional in dating games to have it be difficult to get the "best" ending, I think I should not have emulated that. Many people play IFComp games until they get to one ending, any ending, and having an early "game over" doesn't encourage further study.

Testing

I mentioned in my Skillick's Bride postmortem that I wanted to get testers involved earlier in the process. I did do that! I got 2-3 people to play the first third of the game. Their feedback was really encouraging, but of course, couldn't include the variable fine-tuning that comes after the game is complete. I was able to get 5-6 testers to sit down with my game after it was complete. I made a Google form for them. But I should have asked them what endings they got to and what key decisions they made to try to predict what route most players took (maybe there is an in-Twine way to track player choices?). I should have asked them more specific questions about how they thought the variables worked. Maybe I should have eliminated the variable sidebar completely!? I am still not sure how I would have improved that part of the game.

Reviews

I am indulging my weird whims in Admiration Point. To have multiple people write in-depth reviews of the game, with several of them really "getting" what I was trying to say, was intensely satisfying. I don't think I've ever received so much positive feedback from anything else I've written. It felt like some of the reviewers understood the problems in my life better than I myself do, just by playing my game. It has helped me feel like I am not alone in having complicated feelings about men because of patriarchy and in enjoying speculative fiction about metadata. If you reviewed Admiration Point, thank you very much! You are helping me to learn how to be a better videogame writer.

Skillick's Bride post-mortem

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 19:43:00 +0000

I made a short Twine game called Skillick's Bride that you can play for free on itch.io. It is a feminine Mormon horror game and is gross and disturbing, so take a look at the content warning before playing. I wanted to write a bit about my process in creating the game.

Two years ago I found Bluebeard's Bride when I was searching for a tabletop game that focuses more on "feminine" aspects of play. I was searching for a more "feminine" tabletop game, but that simply meant having more to do with conversation and relationships than fighting. I don't think that relationships are inherently more "feminine", but hey, I needed a keyword. I felt intrigued by the game's concept and wished vaguely that someone would play it with me. This year, I was determined to make it happen and actually played the game with three of my friends. To prepare to be the "groundskeeper", I listened to some live playthroughs of the game. I haven't played very many tabletop RPGs and felt a bit lost in how to prepare myself. The handbook said to simply make stuff up on the spot, but I found that the rooms that had the best impact were ones that I had planned ahead of time. I had an idea to do a whole game focused on Mormon women's issues, but I felt like that could be too intense for my friends who have varying relationships to the church.

Horror vs. realism

The tension of being "too intense" or "too real" is one I've noticed as I've read more horror novels. I had the hardest time liking World War Z because reading about a zombie pandemic after experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic did not feel like a fun mind experiment. The most horrifying snippets in my head are ones that I've read on the Wikipedia pages of serial killers or in the memoirs of abuse victims. Those are things that actually hurt a little to read. I think horror should hurt a little, but be removed enough from real life to not give me obsessive thoughts. When horror is sufficiently removed and addresses an anxiety I've experienced, it gives me enough distance to feel cathartic. In writing Skillick's Bride, I wanted to experience that cathartic distance with some of my own experiences with childbearing and being a woman in the LDS Church. I've also had trouble finding horror novels that address the existential horror of childrearing.

I made the horrifying topics I wanted to address abstract to different degrees, with varying degrees of success. I think the breastfeeding room and the childbirth room may have been TOO explicit. I wonder if I could have further abstracted the horror there to help make the game more accessible. The scene where you are asked to groom a strange animal is obviously a metaphor for obligation sex. Since I felt like having a sex scene in the game would be too triggering or explicit for my audience, I felt compelled to turn it into a bizarre one. I was worried about this room being too weird, but two of my friends said that this was their favorite room. The room also has more options for actions than the other rooms. Since each room simply ends with the player's evaluation of who was responsible for the suffering experienced there, I could have had a lot more freedom in "ending" the rooms in various states, which allows for more player freedom. I didn't do this with very many rooms though, because I wanted to finish writing the game quickly.

I wanted to release the game before Halloween. This was helpful to motivate me to work on the game, but a few things were rushed at the end. In particular, the room where the group of manservants decides what room you should be in feels short and weak, as does the cellar.

Fanfiction helps scope

It was very helpful to be writing within the context of Bluebeard's Bride because it gave my project a scope. The tabletop game explicitly addresses the suffering of women and tells you, the "groundskeeper", not to focus on why Bluebeard is the way he is or his relationship with his mother or whatever. Having Bluebeard, or in my game, Skillick, be a foil for patriarchy, helped to focus the game on the player's experience and women's issues, especially when I was tempted to make Skillick a sympathetic character.

I should have focused further on what, exactly, I wanted Skillick to represent. After the player experiences each room, they decide whether to be "faithful" to Skillick and blame the suffering on the woman or some aspect of society, or to be "unfaithful" and blame it on Skillick or the church. I think focusing on Skillick as a representation of a perverse church--a bridegroom who was the opposite of a savior--could have helped the game feel more focused. As I wrote it, it didn't encompass all of the feelings player might have had; maybe they wanted to be "faithful to Skillick" but not "faithful to the church". Some rooms focused more on cultural issues and some more on the character of Skillick.

If I come back to this game to improve it, I would want to make more options available in each room and make some of the shorter rooms a little longer. I think I would change the mother's room to be a kitchen where a mother is drawing their own blood to feed to their vampire child. I would make the game more consistent about whether the servants were actually fellow ward members or not, and decide if I wanted the locations in the game to be consistent with a typical LDS chapel or not (as it is, two rooms are specific to an LDS chapel). I think I would also add a room or two.

Prototyping process

The last thing I want to talk about is my prototyping. I hadn't written a Twine game for several years, so my first priority was to make a prototype to test if I could figure out how to make different endings based on the "faithful" or "unfaithful" scores. With that technical barrier out of the way, I was able to focus on writing. I wish I had gotten feedback after writing a room or two. The Twine Discord was helpful in helping me fix my user and code errors; I'd like to see if I can find some other IF writers to trade in-progress feedback with there. I think if I hadn't been in such a rush to be done, I could have gotten more feedback from my friends and made a better game. As it is, I've proved to myself that I can make a game by myself. I have so many more ideas I want to try!

What's Horror Good For?

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Landaker) — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 16:30:00 +0000

I dreamed about a video game last night.

It was a puzzle visual novel game I reviewed in 2013 called "The Madness". The puzzles were creative and tricky, the atmosphere ominous, and the ending disturbed me so much that I still think about it from time to time.

Is it "good" - productive, useful, beneficial - to be disturbed by something? Obviously humans like it in some sense because we watch horror, we go to haunted houses, we write fiction that disturbs us. Apart from the obvious thrills, some part of us wants to be unsettled, to rethink what we think we know.

I think this affected me so much for two reasons - one is that the pain of making a mistake and having to live with that is one of the worst things to experience. Even though the mistakes I've made are tiny compared to those of villains and tortured anti-heroes, on some small level, I can still relate. In The Madness you try to recover your memories of having done something truly horrible. While I've never had that experience, my mom tells me I punched a kid in fifth grade... but I have no memory of it. Is it possible I've done other terrible things and simply blocked them out with pride and arrogance? What a fearful idea, indeed.

The other part that disturbs me is the idea that some people are irredeemable, that once you've done certain things you are literally better off dead. As a Christian whose faith centers on the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, this really makes me question how much I believe in forgiveness. It's easy to say "Anyone can repent" or "God loves everyone", but then I have to ask myself "What about someone who has done this horrible thing?" Is it possible to come back from that? Is it fair to the victims?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but if horror media jolts me off my prideful pedestal of placated self-satisfaction, or leads me to wrestle with the the hard questions of humanity and eternity, then I think that's a good thing.

If you're interested in playing The Madness, I have bad news for you; you can't download it from anywhere; the original server has been down for years. I found a Let's Play but the person didn't actually solve (or even notice) any of the puzzles. I still have a copy of the game but don't really want to distribute it publicly without the author's permission (though you can message me and I'll send a private link). I'm trying to contact the original author and will update links if I find something better.

The very first game book

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Sun, 03 Oct 2021 20:23:00 +0000

Consider the Consequences (1930) is considered to be the first game book. It has narrative choices that you make by flipping to a certain page to get multiple endings. I'm often more interested in the concept of a game book than actually reading it, but this one was surprisingly domestic and interesting. The three sections of the book let the reader make choices as first Helen, then Jed, and then Saunders. Each section starts with a node diagram of the available branches in that section. The book is co-written by two women, Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins.

The characters and their situations reflect the cultural values of the 1930s, and it's a fascinating window into the social norms surrounding marriage, child support, investments, and other social topics. I found myself irritated when the book seemed overly concerned that my mother would be left at home with no one to keep her company, which is actually an important consideration, if you think about it. The men's stories similarly have the status of their mother's home to consider when investing or spending.

Helen's first choice is whether to marry the irresponsible son of a rich widow or not; if you marry him, you have a baby right away, but it turns out he's an alcoholic and his mother is emotionally dependent on him. Helen's choices are fairly broad. You can end up as a writer to a fancy magazine who falls in love with your editor, and you can choose whether to pursue an affair and ask him to get a divorce, pursue an affair an not ask him to get a divorce, or not pursue an affair. The results are fairly sensible. If you choose to have the affair without him getting a divorce, you have a little difficulty finding an apartment but have some passionate moments together and can't compete with his love for his children. You can also end up at home keeping your mother company! The book has a wry humor that comes out in the endings, which are a considered opposite to morale fairy tales, but definitely have a practical "morale." For example: "the consequence of Helen's choosing the prudent course was that she was safe." Or "the consequence of denying herself an unpractical romance or a broken heart was the discovery that she could love a second time as heartily as the first time."

The style of the book is matter-of-fact, and time passes rapidly between choice nodes. It was refreshing to be able to play a "romance" game book with such a variety of options, all of which were given due consideration, and the progressed so rapidly. While there were some old-fashioned values in the book, like when your character gets away with murder by revealing that the victim was in a romantic relationship with his wife, the available options and reflections felt surprisingly progressive. I highly recommend this early gamebook if you can borrow a copy.

The legacy of Princess Maker 2

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 17:57:00 +0000

As someone who helped write a game about parenting, I have opinions about parenting games. It's difficult to combine fiddly statistics with a narrative that gives a good simulation of both the day-to-day parenting decisions and an occasional event that feels like a pivotal moment, like how much dessert to give your child vs, deciding if you're going to force your child to take piano lessons. I'm on a quest to find and review all the parenting games that I can! I want to find the best parenting games and learn from their game design.

The first parenting game I ever played was Princess Maker 2 (1996). It's set in a medieval fantasy world where you become guardian of an 11-year-old orphan. You decide her schedule, where you can pay for her to attend expensive classes or she can make money by working. She can learn etiquette so she can properly greet the king's concubine, or she can work on a farm improving her stamina and earning money. She can study art and enter the yearly art contest, or hone her spiritual sensitivity while work in the graveyard. She can go to church and be pious, or work in a sleazy bar! Your daughter can also go out adventuring and either talk to or beat monsters she encounters in four different areas. I remember trying out lots of different ways of raising my child. Essentially, this game is a stat-cruncher and it's hard to feel connected to your daughter in the game. She seems more like a collection of numbers than a real person. Your choices for her schedule definitely affect her ending occupation and role in society, and there are many, many different endings. I would say that it's a classic that introduced parenting as a worthy game narrative to a western audience. The sequels were only recently localized and made available in the United States, although fans agree that Princess Maker 2 is the best of the series. You can play the original localization that wasn't sold in the US, or you can buy the remake on Steam.

Ciel Fledge: A Daughter Raising Simulator is a direct descendent of the Princess Maker games, but there is a science-fiction setting and more things to fiddle with. You decide what classes your daughter should take and they raise various stats that she needs, and I think they affect the endings. Your daughter can make a lot of friends, and there is a mood system where your daughter will get depressed if she's too stressed out. Unfortunately, I didn't really like this game. Learning about how to battle felt like reading a textbook, and the writing was not compelling. If you've played a lot of Princess Maker 2 and want to see a different take on the stat-raising simulation, you might want to try it. It's on Steam.

If you prefer an interactive narrative, The Parenting Simulator is a text-based game that allows you to make a few key decisions for each year of your child's life. Instead of just saying you're a permissive parent, like in Ciel, you have to actually role-play being permissive, which in the above scenario would entail letting your child have as much screen time as they want! The writing in this game is good, and if I have any complaints, it's that their pandemic year event was a bit TOO lifelike and brought me out of my games-as-escape reverie. At the same time, I had a hard time believing that letting my child stay up all night at her sleepover made her that unpopular. There are still stats in the background, although some reviewers complained that it's difficult to get different endings. As a game designer, I wonder if it's because you have the option of playing an abbreviated version of the game with only a few random events per year vs. playing every event each playthrough--having fewer events would be less opportunity to affect end-determining stats.

Of course, I'm not going to end a post about parenting without mentioning my own game that I made with my sister and sister-in-law, Space to Grow. Like The Parenting Simulator, we tried to focus on a few key parenting events each year. You also choose how much your daughter should help you with your farm. Your daughter has a definite personality! My family was speculating about how much she was based on my nephews and nieces. The game is set on a foreign planet, and you make decisions that affect your community as well as your family. I think we reached a good balance of realism vs. cool science fiction stuff. Let me know how you like the game if you decide to play it! It's available on Steam, itch.io, and Google Play.

I love parenting games! I'm hoping to make another post that includes Growing Up, Cute Bite, and My Child Lebensborn.

Princess Maker 2 screenshot by Donald Love 87 on GameFAQs

Why pay for indie games??

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Landaker) — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 18:30:00 +0000

(cross-posted from itch.io)

As we near the end of production on Our Personal Space 2: Space to Grow, we've been talking less about game design and more about user experience, audience, and distribution. One subject that has come up is whether we want to charge money for this game. Our Personal Space was free, mostly because it was our first game and we weren't sure we could actually do it or how good it was. I also felt (and still feel!) that I want people to be able to experience the games I make regardless of financial situation. However, I also want to support game creators financially - I would love for talented designers, artists, and programmers to be able to make a living doing what they love. I also hate ads in games - they take the player out of the experience and feel tacky and, honestly, no one likes them.

Game creators making a living doing what they love will never happen unless it becomes normal to pay creators for their work! When our default response is "I'm not paying money for a GAME", it implies that making games is not worthwhile, and we don't really want people to make games. I feel that games are worthwhile, especially those that give me a chance to hear stories I wouldn't normally hear, or help me practice being a better human, or encourage me to pause after playing it and feel understood or like I understand others in the real world better.

If you've ever made a game, you know that it is a LOT of work! Making a prototype that works is usually not that hard; making a real game that is fun and polished and complete takes much more time. On this game our team kept timecards; we've spent over 1000 hours on this game and we're still not quite finished yet! That's about six months of full time work, though it's actually been five years since we also have day jobs, kids, volunteer work, etc. I hope that we will be able to make enough money that we can pay our programmer, writers, and artist and invest that money into future games!

However, I recognize that not everyone has the money to pay for games. Since we don't have "libraries" like we do for books, we've decided to have a "pay-what-you-want" option here on itch.io. Steam and Google play don't have that option, so we will charge something on those platforms. I hope this compromise will allow us to continue to make games and pay content creators, while also allowing anyone who wants to to be able to play our game.

If we support game creators and respect the time they've put into game creation, we will end up with better games and a better game community!

Thimbleweed Park is very 90s but has an unsatisfying ending.

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Tue, 29 May 2018 03:41:00 +0000

This year I'm trying to review every game I finish. I've tried to review the game in the store I bought it in, because I think that's more helpful to developers. So far I've reviewed five games on Steam and one in Apple's app store. I recently finished Thumbleweed Park on the Switch and there isn't a way to leave written reviews in the Switch eShop, so it's back to this old blog for this one.

Last year I started watching Twin Peaks because people kept making references to it and I felt left out. I found it weird a compelling. The surreal small-town melodrama, its fantastic soundtrack, and its quirky characters stood out to me. I can see why it has a cult following. A lot of people compared Thimbleweed Park's aesthetic to Twin Peak's, and they both have the surreal, small-town murder in the 1990s going on. Twin Peaks was great at contrasting mundane things that would really happen with surreal ways things could go wrong. It was full of abusive relationships, mental and physical illness, secret illicit relationships, secret communications and liasons, and references to dream symbols.

I didn't make it to the end of Twin Peaks's second season, so I don't have to be unsatisfied with whatever ending they came up with... but I'm sure it was more satisfying than Thimbleweed Park's. Exploring the town and talking to characters in Thimbleweed Park was the best. The art style was so spot-on I just took it for granted. The tones from the phone and the soundtrack really brought me back to the 90s. I also made the mistake of calling a character's home phone instead of their business's phone, forgetting that most people didn't have cell phones back then!

The characters were zany and weird, and I loved Delores's flashback sequence where she applies to work at a videogame studio. I was really impressed with the sheer number of titles in the in-game library, which I guess were part of the Kickstarter rewards and were mostly written by backers, but they made it possible to hide information within the library. I thought this was a good integration of Kickstarter content. Similarly, having an entry in the phone directory was part of a Kickstarter reward, and there were over 3,000 of them. It definitely prevented me from dialing every single number in the phone book just to see what would happen.

Despite these things that I liked, there were quite a few things I disliked. Many, many puzzles were unintuitive. I found myself dialing the hint number many times in the middle of the game. I guess weird puzzle solutions are part of "classic" point-and-click adventure games, but it's not a part I like.

spoilers for Thimbleweed Park follow

The "twist" ending was that the characters discover they are in a videogame and want to delete it to escape the cycle of being characters in a videogame. This is a narrative conceit that has been done a few times before and I don't find it satisfying here. Zero Time Dillema, and Undertale made certain aspects of save games part of their games in brilliant ways that furthered the narrative. Okay, so the characters know it's a videogame... how does that help the narrative in Thimbleweed Park? From the build-up surrounding the mystery of the factory and Chuck's diary entries, I was expecting to engage in dialogue with the rogue AI, a highly traditional scene ripe for subversion. I was also expecting the text adventure to be a LOT longer, considering its build-up. I was hoping for some explanation for Chuck's madness beyond his highly transparent and convenient diary entries. I also expected one of the characters to go on a surreal vision quest and receive divine aid. I thought we were going to find out that some of the small-town residents were complicit in Chuck's crimes or at least that two unlikely people were making out. Instead, computer Chuck gave characters easy ways to fulfill their personal goals and Delores turned off the computer in a more primitive form of the game. It was very disappointing. It made me wonder if the developers were rushed to finish the game's script and came up with that?

I know that it's easy to establish a mood of weirdness and hard to write a satisfying ending. I would have been okay with lots of unanswered questions if the given explanation hadn't been so trite. I wish I had stopped in the middle of the game when I got stuck so I could just imagine the great ending I thought was coming. But since I finished, I get to gripe with everyone else about a genre I love. :-)

How and why to stop buying videogames on sale

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 22:02:00 +0000

Last January I resolved to not buy any games on sale. I mostly stuck to my resolve, although I ended my resolution a bit early. I bought more new games, mostly for consoles, and I did play the games I bought. When I got a PS4, I allowed myself to buy three games on sale, but I've only extensively played one of them. The games I impulse buy are rarely ones I devote much time to playing.

If you have the luxurious problem of having too many games to play, and you find yourself impulse-buying a lot of games, I recommend not buying games on sale. When you invest more money in a game, you feel more obligation to actually play it, and hopefully have fun and feel some fleeting sense of "accomplishment". But if you don't have a lot of money to spend on videogames, definitely shop the sales (and remember that Nintendo rarely puts Pokemon/Mario/Kirby games on sale)! I didn't buy any humble videogames bundles this year and at first it felt like I was missing out, but I actually didn't miss out on much.

Here's some helpful self-talk for talking yourself out of buying more videogames:
"If it turns out I really want that game later, I can buy it at full price."
"It's not saving money if I don't play any of the games I buy."
"When will I play this game?"

I pretty much stopped buying games in genres I don't actually play. As interesting as the FPS genre may be, I don't like the gameplay. I also tend not to get into strategy videogames. I like visual novels, but I only like to play one at a time. I think I have way more platformers than I'll ever play. Basically, I have enough videogames, and the main reason I buy more is to feel like I'm a part of the gaming community at large. But that also means that the games I do play tend to be things like Pokemon or Final Fantasy XV. I like the idea of playing hipster videogames, but I'm such a snob that the only things that draw me to indie games are really cute art or unusual storytelling mechanics--like Pony Island.

I also think a helpful rule for me would be to play games within a week of buying them. When I can still remember what the game was about and why I bought it, I feel more excited to play the game. There is a certain charm to "discovering" a game you've owned for a while though! I know I'm not the only one with this problem. Do you consider spending $8-$15 a month on games you won't play to be useful for the thrill of shopping? Or is it more efficient to spend $40 every few months on a title you're hyped for? My rate of videogame consumption is pretty low, so I think my current system is working well for me.

Undertale and determination, power, and passivity

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Sat, 16 Jan 2016 20:49:00 +0000

SPOILERS for Undertale

I was pumped to beat Undertale. I had given up on learning how to dodge all of Asgore's attacks and I decided to go back and get the Temy armor. I farmed glasses for gold and sent Tem to college for 1000 G, and then farmed some more to get the armor. And... I was able to beat the boss this time! Except he wasn't the final boss! I died a few times to Photoshop Flowey, but I soon gave up. I watched the endings on YouTube. I might not have beaten the game but I enjoyed the time I spent playing it, and it made me reflect on the nature of determination, power, and mercy in games. I wish I had time to make these thoughts longer and more organized, but I don't, so I'll consider myself lucky to just get them down. Also I LOVE the soundtrack.

Undertale is a game about determination--the determination to forgive or kill everyone. By giving up, did I lose the game? In a normal RPG, if I had lost to the boss, I could go level up some more, or make some cooler armor, or possibly go do some sidequests and just forget about the final boss. But since Flowey takes away your ability to save (the game goes straight into his fight, and there's no option to run away or defer the fight), it makes the game more frustrating. And while the game's bullet-hell-based combat system is innovative, I suck at it. I don't have the patience or determination to play those kinds of games, so I didn't get to officially exercise mercy or "get" to the end. I think game-wise, I'm okay with that, because boss fights have never been my favorite part of a game.

Control and power and major themes of Undertale. I didn't like the parts where I lost control over what happened to my save file, but it was necessary for the plot. And the best, pacifist ending doesn't give you any levels, which is a way for the player to say, "hey, I care more about seeing what happens if I don't kill anyone than feeling powerful right now." Undertale without leveling is kind of an anti-rpg because there's no satisfaction from seeing arbitrary numbers climb up (so by necessity, combat must be skill-based). The idea that you'll be happiest if you give up power and control over the world is a very religious one (and one that many religions share--Christianity, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism at least). The way the game lets you choose between fighting and "action"ing an enemy feels like the difference between choosing "fight" and "skill" in a JRPG. It doesn't even feel like it will be relevant later on, but it definitely is. Oh, and the way you could actually "flee" the boss fight with Undyne was genius, even though I felt stupid when I had to look it up.

The idea that you have to get to know someone before they'll stop fighting you is an interesting metaphor for relationships--are there some people that you have to put up with some quirks or even abuse before you can really forgive them? The protagonist's passivity in the pacifist route is admirable, but in real life not everyone will change if they encounter someone who is nice to them. But I think the charming and heartfelt part of Undertale is that everyone can and does change in the pacifist route.

I'm not buying games on sale this year

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 17:37:00 +0000

I love shopping for videogame sales, and it's sort of fun to "hold out" on buying a game until the price drops. I have bought and played some cool games from bundles and oh-my-gosh-it's-only-$1-sales, but now I have a giant library of unplayed games, many of which I don't feel excited to play.

If I were more disciplined, I'd resolve not to buy any more games until I've played more of the ones I already own. But instead, I'm going to restrict myself to paying full price for any new videogames I want (and yeah, I'm trying to buy fewer games in general too). If I buy a game for full price, then I'll feel more invested in playing it and maybe writing about it (how would you feel if you never played a game you paid $1 for? $20? $40?). Of course, I have the luxury of being a rich woman who can afford to buy games at full price too. And if the "thrill" of getting a good deal is gone, my videogame shopping can be more purposeful.

I'm also sort-of trying to play certain games before buying certain other ones. So here are the games I'm most looking forward to playing more of this year:

The Talos Principle - I love looking at this game, I feel smart when I manage to solve its puzzles, and the story is enough assassin's-creed-y to be exciting, but not so much that I feel cheezed out... yet, anyway.

Undertale - I love the soundtrack for this game. I'm just stuck on the final boss fight the first time through--I did a pacifist run not realizing that was a new game+ thing? So it's really hard :-(. I love how the choice to kill or interact with enemies was more meaningful in this game. I just really suck at dodging stuff.

Dragon Age 2 - When I play this game I feel like I don't want to rush through it to be "done" with it. Sure, I wish I could just skip all the combat and cut to the conversations, but sometimes the combat is narratively interesting too--like when you do the companion quest for the dwarf guy and he goes it alone, slaying guards left and right with his crossbow, only to find his brother and have him grovel before him... but oh wait, that's now how it happened! I also want to finish this game before playing Inquisition because I'm methodical like that.

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask - great for if I can only get intervals of a few minutes to play something between entertaining my daughter. After I beat this one I'll have played all the Professor Layton games for the DS and 3DS, which I consider some sort of achievement, I guess.

Steins; Gate - I'm at least halfway through this visual novel, and I've been sticking it out because I've heard so many great things about it. The SF elements are very interesting, but the internet-bro characters are really annoying (but I'm hoping the main character has some cool explanation for his weird personality). After I play this one I'll let myself play either Norn 9 or Code:Realize. I played through Amnesia (an otome VN) which I liked pretty well, although some of the consequences of conversation choices were frustratingly opaque.

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer - sometimes I just want a break from frenetic games where the world is ending. When that happens I design houses for adorable animals. I love the Animal Crossing community on Tumblr--I like posting designs there occasionally. Accessible, shareable pixel art! I don't really ever plan on "beating" this game, it's just always there for me. :-)

Indiecade 2015 Overview - Lots of cool games in a creative atmosphere

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 20:26:00 +0000

The best part of Indiecade is seeing games and their designers together, and seeing games you can't just download off the internet. There's a playful, creative atmosphere that I really enjoyed. My sister Andrea and I showed Our Personal Space at the gametasting on Thursday.

Andrea made the cute paper doll diorama

I got the all-access pass so I could see some of my videogame idols (? famous people in games that I like?) at the panels. I'm glad I did that, but if I go again I would just get an exhibit pass (the 3-day all-access pass was about $500, while the exhibit pass was about $100). Many of the panelists talked off the top of their heads about admittedly interesting topics. Adam informed me that most panels are like that. But I'd rather read and essay or play a game those people spent a lot of time preparing. And if you want to spend money to get close to a writer or artist, that's what Patreon is for. So part of me thinks that panels at conventions are a weird thing that should change into something cooler. But another part of me knows that some people really love panels and it's a good way for conventions to support artists in the industry.

I wish I had been able to spend more time looking at all the games, especially the digital selects and the finalists. And the VR games! I didn't realize the lines for games would be so reasonable! All my convention experience is basically MineCon and the Salt Lake Comic Con, which were both super crowded. At those conventions, the panels were a welcome respite from the chaos of the exhibit hall. But at Indiecade, the exhibits didn't feel chaotic and stressful; they felt welcoming and accessible. So big kudos to the organizers for not overselling their convention and keeping it manageable.

We brought my 16-month-old daughter along. Adam was long-suffering and watched her most of the time. There were a few games she was able to interact with, but she's basically too young to enjoy non-tablet games (although she loves Patatap on the iPad). She liked the fountain near the Culver hotel. There weren't any changing tables in any of the restrooms, except for one in the women's restroom in the IndieXchange venue. She didn't mind having a few diaper changes next to her stroller. Luckily we were able to find a babysitter for night games!

If we can't go next year I want to do my best to replicate the experience at home. I think a party where everyone brings a laptop/phone/tablet with an indie game on it they want to share could be really fun.

This ended up being more of a newsy post. I took photos of my notes and I want to write more about the panels I went to! I definitely have things to say about them.

One thing I've been thinking about is that sometimes I feel like I have to play ALL the games before I start trying to make (another) one. It's like I'm worried that someone else will have already made a game like the one I want to make, and I'll be rude to have made something so similar. But like the games advice presentation was saying, there's value in making games that have already been made. They help you learn about how to make games. I need to worry less about making something original and ground-breaking and more about actually making something.

Animal Crossing integrates features into its landscape

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 19:43:00 +0000

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is coming out at the end of September and I've been getting excited about it, so I went back to my New Leaf town. I decided to make things how I want them! I admit that when I first started playing I was really into collecting furniture, bugs, fish, and bells. But now that I've done that I'm much more interested in the personalization aspect of the game. You can design cute little shirts and dresses! What's not to like? And I think Happy Home Designer will make it easier to make things "just so."

The in-game integration of many play aspects is one of AC:NL's strongest design features. Instead of having a pop-up or extra window, there's a place or person you can go to in order to explore other game features. It makes it so the UI can be simpler; instead of having a special menu that you have to go to to enable a feature, there's a place within the game you go to instead. Here's some examples from the game:

Achievements: When you earn a medal, a special walrus shows up in your town. When you talk to him, he presents you with the medal you earned. It's much less invasive than a corner pop-up!
To visit another player's town, you go to a train station (how cute is that?). You can also "open" your town for visitors.
To play multiplayer games you go to a special island.
To visit another player's "dream town" (a snapshot of the town that anyone can visit/mess up at any time without any consequences), you go to a dream spa-like place.
Making "pro" designs and their QR codes can only be done at the clothing shop.
Moving furniture, adding patterns to the ground, digging holes, and other "editing" aspects are done with your avatar (like Minecraft), not an "editing" menu. Sometimes this is really frustrating. I suspect it makes it easier for children and people who don't play lots of other games to figure out how to manipulate things quickly.
Ordering furniture and managing your money are done through special kiosks.

Nintendo games are really good at using in-game locations for game features; I know Fantasy Life and Pokemon Black/White have similar places you go to do multiplayer stuff. It only works with games that have persistent locations or towns where it makes sense for some building or feature to be standardized. Sometimes I think AC:NL goes a little too far with it, especially with the inventory management (you can only access your large inventory from lockers/shelves in your house, and there's no way to auto sort, and there aren't very many inventory slots). But it's an extreme example I think we can all learn from.

Now I have some other thoughts and a bunch of screenshots from the game... view them here after the break!

^This really surprised me. On my birthday two years ago, I was trying to get pregnant and I had been trying for a little bit. I did eventually get pregnant and I have an infant child now. I can't say I love every second, but it's rewarding in a long-term way. Thanks for asking, Mott.

I wish Sable had more adorable rants like this.

If you donate fish to the museum, you can see them in the aquarium part.

The villagers say lots of cute things.

Sometimes they say the same things over and over, and sometimes it's even still cute.

I found out that in an earlier 3DS firmware version it was possible to hack into AC:NL and really customize everything. I visited Roswell (address 5400 - 5123 - 0408), and I was blown away by how cute and creative it was. Here are some screenshots:

this is an exercise/laundry room

A dorm-like game area

In order to get bamboo in the water and flowers/villagers on the beach you have to use the hacks.

A very creative use of pop-up books... as houses soon to be abducting by a UFO!

yeah, I feel the same way.

I went to another town called Limbo, which was also pretty cool. Tumblr is definitely the place to see screenshots from super-cute towns!

Does suffering increase hope? Danganronpa 2 thinks so.

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Thu, 28 May 2015 16:39:00 +0000

Danganronpa 2 is a visual novel murder mystery game where you help solve the crimes. You're one of sixteen high school students stranded on an island, and you can't leave unless you murder another student and avoid detection. If someone can do that, everyone else remaining on the island dies and they can go free. But if you and the group successfully deduce the murderer, the murderer dies and the rest of you can continue to live to play this sick game.

SPOILERS for Danganronpa 2 below.

One underlying theme of the game is that your situation pushes you to a deep despair to allow you to enjoy a greater hope later on. The game presents this hope as vital to your continual survival in a world full of despair.

Not every religion sees hope as a virtue. Buddhists urge us to abandon hope or "give up all hope":

One of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you're wanting yourself to get better, you won't. As long as you have an orientation toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are.

In Christianity, hope is a virtue. It's part of having faith to have hope that you will live after death, and assuming that Christianity is correct (that's where the hope comes in), that you will be forgiven of your sins and live eternally. In Danganronpa 2, Chiaki represents the Christian ideal of hope, especially since she saves the group from their deaths through her sacrifice and enables them to return to the world outside the game.

Chiaki represents Christian hope

Christian hope in anime games is all about believing in yourself.

Chiaki is the "regular" flavor of hope, and Nagito represents the diabolical inversion of hope. Nagito is one of your fellow students who seems a little too enthusiastic about the death game. His idea is that by helping to make a completely hopeless or despairing situation, he can actually increase hope when such a situation proves fortuitous.

He attributes this twisted sense of hope to his "ultimate talent," which is that he is ultimately lucky. If he participates in a lottery, he'll win it. If he plays Russian roulette, he'll succeed at not shooting himself.

He orchestrates his death so that the murderer is random. Because he's ultimately lucky, the person he wants to kill him does so unwittingly. If you and your friends hadn't figured it out, he would have ultimately contributed to the deaths of everyone except the murderer. In this way he's also kind of an inverted savior figure, but he is unsuccessful.

In the end, Chiaki does some kind of computer magic, and you're able to break free of the computer simulation and defeat the virus that represents ultimate despair. Why couldn't you go all super-powered earlier?

The way Danganronpa 2 ends, it seems like the authors are rooting for the "ultimate despair leads to ultimate hope" version of things (especially taking the original Danganronpa into account). It certainly makes for interesting, possibly benevolent motives on the part of the characters who set up the death games.

Certainly in Christianity, there's an idea that everyone goes through "trial by fire," or that the difficulties of life will make you into a more faithful person. But taken to an extreme, this idea is a little disturbing. If hard things in life can make you more faithful or even "better," why not cause other people to suffer so they can reach their ultimate potential? I'd like to think that Christianity has some safeguards against this, like commanding adherents not to murder each other. But what if it was all simulated suffering? Why not incite despair to create hope in a safe environment? Right now my best answer is "because that doesn't seem right, fun, or good" which is pretty unsatisfying. Thanks, Danganronpa 2, for making me think about these things.

May BoRT: How in-game decisions can make you miss content

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Tue, 19 May 2015 03:26:00 +0000

I am the kind of person who likes to plan things out in my life. I like to plan out what meals I'll make for my family ahead of time, and if something has to change at the last minute, sometimes I freak out a little. Having a plan gives me a little control over my life, which now that I have a year-old daughter, is even more important to me. I've enjoyed games like Rune Factory 4 and Bravely Default which let me plan my actions out pretty far in advance. I hate it when games unexpectedly take you away from an area you could have done more sidequests in, or if I feel like I can't get off the narrative tracks.

When I first played Dragon Age: Origins, I left the first town, Lothering, before I had fully explored it and I missed out on Leliana and Sten. When I found out, I felt cheated. Two characters represented quite a bit of the story telling that I actively wanted to read! I probably should have noticed various subtle signals that I wouldn't be able to return to Lothering. I also felt cheated when [spoiler] I couldn't stay with Alistair because I was an elf! [/spoiler]

Another time I felt like I "missed out" was in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. I found out that I could have returned a wallet I picked up for extra points, among other things. I felt both impressed that they included this detail and annoyed that it didn't follow other adventure game conventions where people don't care about their crap.

yes, of course you pick it up

what do you mean this was the appropriate reaction 2 hours of gametime later? [src]

I could have avoided this "missing out" if I had read through walkthroughs carefully. But as much as I like to plan things, I also enjoy not knowing what will come next. If never missing out on parts of games means never being surprised, I'm okay with missing out on a few things.

And perhaps it's more realistic to have some actions have big, unpredictable consequences (like what race you choose in DA:O). It's hard to simulate "fate" in a computer game, since the entire storyline is obviously "fated" by the writers. But when a decision you make turns out to affect more than just the immediate situation, it can give the world a richer feel. That is, as long as it's not a dumb decision like whether you choose vanilla or chocolate ice cream (an actual decision in the branching-path graphic novel Meanwhile that determines whether or not there's any story at all).

Four Narrative-Driven Indie Video Games You Should Take Seriously

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Landaker) — Wed, 13 May 2015 03:40:00 +0000

Games are relaxing and fun, right? Just point and click and let all your worries slip away...

But sometimes it's more satisfying to face those worries head-on, and what better format to do so in than in the safe space of a video game? So, go ahead; ponder the existence and will of God, or the situational ethics of a Battle Royale, or the possibility of being the only survivors of a mass human extinction, or the idea that the most horrifying evil of all dwells in your own heart. Don't worry; it's only a game...

The Shivah by Wadjet Eye Games

(PC/Mac/Linux, iOS, Android; $1.99-4.99)

There’s not really a category for this game - you’re a rabbi investigating a murder in an old-school adventure game format. Although it is set within the Jewish New York culture, it is still accessible to those not of that culture and its themes are universal. Even as you explore for clues, the dialogue makes you question what it means to be wise, what is God’s will, and what it means to belong to a religious community. And there’s rabbinical fisticuffs.

Win The Game by Happy Backwards

(PC, Mac, Linux; free)

Actually being inside a fight-for-your-life game like the Hunger Games would be awful, no doubt about it. But, it turns out playing this game about that kind of survival scenario is not only strategic and adrenaline-pumping, but it’s also thought-provoking, morbid, and… fun? Maybe it shouldn’t be fun. But it is!

Aloners by Sonnet009

(PC, Mac, Linux; free)

Post-apocalyptic romance is a saturated genre right now-- but this gem stands out above the rest for its flexible main character choices, characterization, and backstory. While a lot of items in this genre suffer from too much romance or too much action, this visual novel gets the balance just right, with intricate character building and relationship exploration interspersed with wasteland scavenging and life-threatening situations.

Who Is Mike? by FERVENT

(PC, Mac, Linux; free)

This psychological horror visual novel starts with you waking up in the same room as an identical doppleganger. One of you has to be real. Could you both be real? Or maybe one of you is trying to take over the real person's life. It has you wondering who the real enemy is, and seriously causes you to pause and consider if it might actually be YOU. Don't stop until you've seen all the endings to make sure you see all of this clever story full of twists.

These sexy characters don't really want to be with you

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Mon, 04 May 2015 18:36:00 +0000

My sister Andrea mentioned Taarradhin in a round-up post last October, and I finally got around to playing it. It's short, but it caused me to reflect on the role of romantic interests in dating games. Spoilers for the game follow.

On your first playthough of Taarradhin, you can choose to romance either one of two new slaves in your palace or simply get to know them both a little. The mechanic for choosing has a satisfying logic; if you choose to talk to one of them twice in a row, you're romancing them. In the end, it turns out the slaves were meant to be as a sacrifice to the goddess to petition for rain. You can save the one you romance but there's a feeling of incompleteness. Since the two romance-able characters are slaves, you get the feeling that they're slightly distant from you and trying to please you, even after a "happy" ending with them.

Often in dating games, each new character provides an exciting opportunity to woo and "win over." But the "true ending" in Taarradhin doesn't have you marrying anyone. The "true ending" only unlocks after you've seen the other endings, as if you, the player, needed to get your selfish romancing desires out of the way before you could start to care about the characters on a deeper level.

It's only in the final ending that your player-character really gets to know the two strangers and starts to change her own ideas about the world, shedding some of her entitlement and ignorance (but still retaining her youthful charm). She feels enough compassion to offer herself as a sacrifice in place of her slaves, and subsequently free them. It's much more satisfying than the romantic endings. Because while being married to royalty sounds like a nice life, it would be even nicer to choose one's own path.

I feel like this game caught me objectifying their characters and then gently reminded me that even handsome and beautiful people have their own hardships. Sure, if I'd had the option to talk to them more in the first playthrough, I would have done it then. But because of how the developers unveiled the information, it made me reflect on how I'm sometimes like Neqtia, blissfully unaware in my own little world and just seeing others as a means to achieve my own goals.

How the Internet liked Our Personal Space

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 22:57:00 +0000

It's been two and a half months since we launched Our Personal Space and it has been a great success! We've had over 3,000 downloads so far. We've received reviews from videogame websites, mentions on tumblr, and someone even did a let's play. It's possible you're sick of hearing me sing praises of our praises, and if so consider this post "for the record."

Probably our biggest coverage came from Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Freeware Garden feature. Konstantinos Dimopoulos enjoyed the game:

It’s up to you and the choices you make to help this wonderful game tell a tale of hope. A tale of cooperation, peaceful, interesting lives, democracy, love and community in a science fiction setting that masterfully blends future technologies with historical frontier sensibilities; thankfully this time without the brutal slaughter of indigenous peoples.

After the article went up our server went down and I spent the morning chatting with my sister about how to fix things. I found out that I didn't have the most recent installer anywhere! That's what I get for using git. Notes for next time: have a mirror link ready!

Kimberly at JayIsGames also reviewed the game:

The cast of characters are well drawn and their interactions and the sense of community feel real. While the sci-fi aspect of the game is wonderful, Our Personal Space is not just about physical survival, but ultimately about relationship survival.

On tumblr, the Utah Games Guild, and Fuck Yeah Ren'Py blurbed the game (I actually submitted the post for the Ren'Py tumblr). Gwen at Welcome to Otome Hell wrote a lovely review:

This is a game that allows you to create a character that reacts in the same way you would yourself, and shows legitimate consequences for your actions. Do you want to leave your husband? You can. Do you want to be a loving and devoted wife? You can. Do you want to dedicate yourself to your work and make the colony succeed? You can. Do you want to laze around, learning and doing as little of importance as possible and causing the colony to suffer in consequence? Guess what: you can. I honestly cannot communicate how in love I am with this game. Play it.

Andrea got the game on the Google Play store and we had some very positive reviews there as well. My favorite is from Ace Penguin:

It teaches me to trust people and forgive them . This game makes me feel warm and happy. I wish there are more games like this!

Additionally, SuperPaulGames has done a complete Let's Play on youtube! His commentary is very crass, with lots of sex jokes and fart-type jokes. I didn't watch all of it, but I found it simultaneously annoying and entertaining.

We're grateful to everyone who has played the game and especially those who have said nice things about it. We're planning to submit our game to Indiecade!

Our Personal Space is live!

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Sat, 14 Feb 2015 17:09:00 +0000

I'm happy to announce that Our Personal Space is now live! Download it here for Windows, Mac, Linux, or Android. We're giving it away for free!

My sister Andrea and I started on this game when we realized we wanted to see more games that explored a married relationship, and my sister-in-law Clarissa did all the character art. I had been playing around with Ren'Py a little, and it was a great way to get something working right away.

I'm always hesitant to experiment with coding. It's one difference I've noticed between me and experienced coders like my sister and my husband--I'm always worried I'll mess stuff up, but they're quick to experiment and see how everything works. My "coding" was limited to things like changing variables and "if-then"-type clauses. But I did feel pretty cool when something I wrote worked!

Our Personal Space is like a dating sim in that you have a romantic relationship with a fictional character. But you're married, so it's more about the little choices you make from day-to-day than the excitement of "will we kiss?" at the end of a date. Like in real long-term-relationship, you have other things you're worried about too, like how stressed you are and, in this case, if your colony on another planet will survive. When I look back on the games with dating elements I've enjoyed, many of them have other elements to worry about. Since Persona 4 is part time-management game, when you choose to spend time with someone, it feels more like you're indicating you like them somehow (although if you're playing strategically, wanting to level up a relationship has other motivations). Each month in Our Personal Space you can choose to spend time alone, which decreases your stress more, or spend time with your husband, which increases your relationship (but doesn't decrease stress as much).

One part of Our Personal Space that we might have gone a little overboard on is on choices. The above screenshot is from a New Game+, and the options in italics are only available if you have a certain skill at a certain level. So, on a first playthrough, you might only see one of these options in italics. We wanted to make the game fun to replay, not just to get different endings, but also to see what other options are available (like if you choose to have a baby or not). It's kind of a slow build-up, but I think it's pretty fun! Please try it out, and if you do, I'd love to hear what you thought of the experience--good and bad! There's some discussion going on over on the Lemmasoft forum. Here's the trailer:

Note: Content-wise, I think this game would have a T rating. There are some parts where it's heavily implied that you and your husband are having sex, but it's not explicit. If you were reading it I'd call it a "clean" romance. So feel free to let your teenager play!

some Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 21:43:00 +0000

I promised myself that I would actually take screenshots from a game I played and then make a blog post with them. I don't really feel like writing a coherent essay about it, but here are some screenshots and observations from Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney.

They used a historical fighting stance! (img)

this trial... inspires her to sell flowers? I had some insight about it that I forgot.

If you're depending on a human being or set of humans to judge a court, logic isn't always the most persuasive thing.

the plot was weird

Luke demonstrates that the first time you remember something is probably the most accurate, and further remembering actually changes the memory. I was kind of impressed to see this concept in a game, but they didn't go anywhere with it.

We are so tired of self-awareness that we need to be reassured it is fun in a meta-meta moment.

I enjoyed the game but it was basically half of a Prof. Layton game and half of an Ace Attorney game stuck together to make one game. I was hoping for a bit more synthesis of style, like with puzzles you'd have to solve to solve the court cases? No such luck. But it was still fun/ridiculous.

October BoRT: A playtesting mask

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 20:52:00 +0000

This month's BoRT is about masks in games. I usually play choice-driven games very sincerely, so I don't feel like I'm wearing a mask when I play them. Obviously, I'm not a Japanese high school student or whoever the player-character is, but I usually choose options that make sense to me.

In his Designing Virtual Worlds, Richard Bartle discusses why players play in virtual worlds. He says things like "virtual worlds enable you to find out who you are by letting you be who you want to be." But he's clearly against the mask metaphor--if you become the character you're playing (your "mask"), then you're not really role-playing anymore, are you? For Bartle, role-playing is a kind of psychologically helpful exercise in acting. He's passionate that playing a character completely different from yourself is freeing. It inspired me to create a guardian character in Guild Wars 2 (since I usually play magic-users). But I found that simply playing a different character class didn't make me feel any different about how I played. For me, it took role-playing as a different kind of player (a playtester) to change how I played my characters.

My sister and I have been working on a marriage-relationship-sim game called Personal Space, and lately I have been doing a little playtesting. As a playtester, I want to try different play styles. Instead of choosing what I know will "win," I start role-playing different kinds of players.

no, I don't want to help you right now

My last playthrough, I maxed out my spiritual stat, but I chose somewhat impulsive or selfish replies when interacting husband character. I was studying spiritual writings every week, but there was nothing forcing me to actually change my character's personality. It's a simulation, so there's some limitations to what your character can do, but I felt like maybe I was more like this "impulsive" character than I'd like to be. I study my religion's teachings and I have aspirations at being a more "spiritual" or loving person, but on the other hand, sometimes I'm kind of an impulsive jerk. I'm sure it's possible to role-play a hypocrite in other games, but I hadn't really tried it until I felt like I had to explore different options as a playtester.

I don't think that catharsis or "venting" is helpful for controlling my emotions. But I do think that exploring my options in a videogame is a safe way to see that my habitual way of interacting with others isn't the only way (kind of an odd thing to discover while playing a game I helped write, but there you have it).

Love and Dating Visual Novels

noreply@blogger.com (Andrea Landaker) — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 03:39:00 +0000

And now, just in time for Halloween, it’s…

Love and Dating games! What could be more frightening than admitting a possibly unrequited love, or taking that first leap to a deeper relationship, or staying with just one person for the rest of your life?! Time to face your fears with these visual novels about love and dating!

All of these below are available for free for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Save the Date

Have you ever felt like dating was a game that it was impossible to win? Like all the cards were stacked against you? Things quickly devolve into the improbable and surreal as you try to overcome impossible odds and save your date in this love sim parody.

That Cheap and Sacred Thing

If an android could love - true love - how would it manifest? What kind of a relationship can an android and a human really have, when both are so limited? Explore these questions in this kinetic novel.

Wedding Vows

Not only does this kinetic novel follow a couple over the course of decades, but it does so in a sweet and non-linear fashion, showing both the influence of the past and its impermanence.

Taarradhin

With a beautiful, ancient Egypt-inspired setting and gorgeous character art and backgrounds, this visual novel examines slavery, romantic and non-romantic love, and our perceptions of our own culture and other people. Make sure you get all the endings and then the true ending!

Results from the videogame preferences and morals survey

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 20:47:00 +0000

Back in March I asked for volunteers for a survey about videogame preferences and morals. Then I had a baby and I kind of forgot about the results for a while. The blog link to the initial call for responses also has information on what questionnaires we used.

Results

We solicited responses from Twitter and Facebook and a forum I frequent and received 75 responses. About 70% (53) of respondents were between the ages of 25-34. 29% (22) were women.

Some people complained about how I switched the likert scale halfway through (i.e., 1 became "strongly agree" rather than "strongly disagree"), so after about 50 responses I added a heads-up about that. The reason for this switch was to preserve the wording of the original questionnaires. You can see everyone's responses here (yay for open source social science). There are a few different sheets on the results spreadsheet. We used the most conservative method of converting the videogame preferences to subscales (detailed in this master's thesis).

My friend Michael Davison helped with the data analysis (I have done similar analyses in SPSS, but it's been a long time I don't have access to that software anymore). He used the R project software to compute correlations between the videogame preference subscales and the morals subscales and within the subscales themselves. This was an exploratory study so we didn't try to predict the results, although I kind of thought a preference for shooting games would correlate negatively with harm/care, or possibly positively correlate with in-group loyalty.

Probably the most interesting correlation was that preferences for adventure and puzzle games were correlated with the fairness/reciprocity moral subscale. A preference for adventure games had a .33 correlation (p < .01) and a preference for puzzle games had a .31 correlation (p < .01).

Discussion

I was wondering why there weren't any other interesting correlations between the moral subscales and the videogame preferences. One possible reason is that we had a better range of preferences for adventure and puzzle games (14-100 and 31-93 respectively), whereas the range for Action: shooting was 22-74. It's possible I didn't have enough participants who really liked shooting games, or that there is simply no correlation between liking shooting games and wanting other people to suffer.

As for why a preference for adventure and puzzle games correlates with wanting justice and things to be fair, I'm not sure. Perhaps a desire for fairness and a penchant for puzzle-solving stems from a desire for things to be logical or predictable?

Regrets

I was hoping to be able to learn the R software and figure out how to compute Bayesian t-tests (this article inspired me) or a factor analysis and try it out with these data, but I'm not sure if I'll get around to it. If you would like to, go ahead!

Video Games Live: hyperreal!

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Mon, 08 Sep 2014 01:58:00 +0000

I went to Video Games Live yesterday! I didn't make it to SLC comic con, because I have a baby, but sitting down for some entertainment without waiting in any lines was definitely more my speed. It was pretty fun to hear some familiar game music in a concert hall. Here are some observations I had:

-It was weird to go to a concert a experience music in a way the composer specifically didn't intend. Usually when I go see a symphony I feel like I'm finally setting aside some time to TRULY enjoy this music like I'm SUPPOSED to. But with videogame music, it's more "true to the original" to listen to the music while you play the game. They played two songs from the Journey soundtrack and it actually kind of bothered me that the video clips of the game didn't match where the song occurs in the game originally: "no, you're supposed to be going through the apotheosis level now! And now the credits should roll!" (yes, I can feel your eyes rolling from here. It was just a weird feeling and I wanted to tell you about it.)

-The symphony participated in an OCRemix version of Celeste's theme, and I was weirding out about how it was an orchestra trying to sound like a remix of a digital symphony. So hyperreal!

-At first I wasn't sure why they didn't have a classical conductor, but then I realized that conducting for this concert was a completely different job. Each piece had a video that went with it, and yes, it was synced to the music, so there was some soundtrack-timing-level-preciseness with the tempo that went on (either that or their A/V guys were just really good at adapting to tempo). There was also one part where they took a volunteer from the audience to play space invaders with motion controls and they played the music live. It reminded me of how before movie theaters had speakers, they had organists who made up music to go with the silent films (I went to a recreation at BYU once and it was pretty cool). Most soundtracks these days do have some procedural elements, so it's like the improvisational aspects of performative soundtracks are built-in.

-Another way that game soundtrack music is exciting in ways that classical music used to be exciting is that most of the composer are alive and many of them know each other. So you get things like the composer conducting their own music (when/why did this tradition stop?). The soundtrack world is where our classical music is still living, in my opinion (in that it's both popular and still classical).

-There were some moments where the "founder of Video Games Live!" felt a little cheesy, but in some ways I identified with the "gamer" crowd in that I was pretty excited to hear music from games I've loved. As much as I wish I could help reclaim the "gamer" label though, I feel like it's a stupidly polarizing term, and maybe I'll just be "someone who enjoys videogames, as well as other entertainment media."

BoRT: Videogames as a comfort during breastfeeding

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 20:24:00 +0000

I mentioned in my last post that I feel like the "how videogames changed my life"-type personal essays help legitimize my time spent playing videogames. Now I'll write my own personal story about it as part of the latest Blogs of the Round Table. "Did you ever find yourself in a better place or positive position as a result of play?"

About two months ago I had a baby whom I'll call Piper. I did use Lumines to cope with some of the pain of childbirth, but at some point I couldn't really concentrate on anything besides the experience of pushing an infant out of my uterus. The birth went fine, and after a week in the NICU with some apnea, we were able to come home with our baby. I had tons of support learning to breastfeed in the hospital, but after I got home, feeding all the time was starting to drain (ha) me. I found ways to watch TV while I fed Piper, but I also wanted to play videogames.

My desire to multitask while breastfeeding was actually a really good thing. It helped me to improve my breastfeeding posture so that I was slouching back instead of leaning over to feed Piper. It made me learn how to cradle Piper in the crook of my arm instead of clinging her to my breast with two hands. And it also helped me relax during breastfeeding instead of worrying about if she was eating enough or if she was latched on correctly. I was able to play the third Ace Attorney game, which is playable one-handed and easily interrupted. Playing games also helped me to feel like I was more than a milk machine--I was a milk machine AND someone who could connect small logical leaps in a videogame!

As lovely as videogames are, I feel like I could have made similar progress in my life with other media. What if reading a book two-handed while breastfeeding had been my goal? Or talking on the phone? Maybe I'm giving videogames too much credit here?

On videogame personal essays

noreply@blogger.com (Rachel Helps) — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 23:43:00 +0000

I've been reading some of the Games Journalism 2013 shortlist ebook on my e-reader while exercising. First off, it is such a different experience to read games journalism in book-like form. If I feel a little bored, I can't immediately close the tab and start reading something else. So I'm a captive audience. I enjoy most of the articles too, especially the ones that focus on the psychology of videogames, like the one about freemium whales (users who spend lots of money on premium content in free games). There are some close readings of games, and also a fair amount of what I'd call personal essays centered around videogames.

Recently Jonas Kyratzes and Dan Cox (see the comments) mentioned how they're tired of these videogame personal essays. I know in other places people have said that such essays aren't journalism, or that the experience of reading them is unsatisfying. I agree that a personal essay is more like creative writing than journalism. I like reading personal essays about videogames though! I feel like reflecting on the experiences we have in games legitimizes them. It makes me feel better about playing games in my free time.

I also think that the videogame personal essay is much more accessible than close analysis. Someone who has never played the game you're talking about can still enjoy a personal essay about playing it. It's a little more difficult to engage a naive reader in a technical discussion of a game's design points. For example, I skipped the piece in the games journalism e-book about silent hill savepoints, because it had spoilers for the series, and also because I wasn't sure if I'd really understand the analysis, since I've never played a Silent Hill game (even though I'm pretty sure I've read an article about how awful those save points are). I think this is why the most successful "close readings" of games are often focused on games that are already popular.

On the other hand, a skillful writer can make game design analysis interesting, usually through the use of diagrams and screenshots. But man, those things are a lot of work! Especially since there isn't a way to take screenshots on the PS3/Wii in the console's software (but even if there were, it would still be a pain to move the files somewhere I could use them). Some day I will do a great game analysis complete with screenshots.