Results tagged “recommendation” from Softcore Gamer
I get the impression that not a lot of people have heard of - let alone
played - Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble. That might not be the
case for long, though. The WGA just announced their nominees for best video game writing,
and DHSGIT took the dark horse spot. I haven't played, um, any of the
competition, except a little bit of Fallout 3, but I'd love to see a
well-written indie game like this one take the prize.
I certainly recommend that you give Dangerous High School Girls a look, although it isn't by any means a perfect game. In this interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, author Keith Nemitz stated that "the story is about the culture of small-minded people and how strong, truthfully educated women can improve it." The writing is charming, funny, and does an excellent job of telling that story.
My reservations about the game come from some of the design decisions. Mostly, it's structured like a standard RPG, with semi-random encounters, experience, and character leveling - although it distances itself from any of that terminology. This structure works really well, actually, except that it doesn't allow the player to do any grinding.
In most RPGs, the player progresses the story by exploring a space and completing encounters. Succeeding in an encounter gives the player's party experience, which eventually causes them to become more powerful. Failing in an encounter, typically, does not give the player experience or progress the story (because, typically, it results in a fail-state, forcing the player to restore a saved game). The player, therefore, gets more powerful as the story progresses; later parts of the story open up new areas where the encounters are more difficult, theoretically matching the player's advancement.
Sometimes, though, the player doesn't level up fast enough. That's where grinding comes in. If the encounters become too difficult, the player can take a step back and play through some additional encounters in an easier area, gaining enough experience to tackle the continuation of the story on better terms.
Dangerous High School Girls doesn't have a death-equivalent fail-state, which I like. At least, it looks good on paper, but in practice, it doesn't always work out well. Instead of having to restart when you fail an encounter, you suffer some form of negative reinforcement and then play continues. At best, this negative reinforcement takes the form of a missed opportunity - a chance to have gained experience or some other bonus, while the story continues to progress. Frequently, however, you actually lose a buff or one of the girls in your party. Which makes it easy to find yourself falling behind the difficulty curve, facing encounters that are way out of your league.
Grinding is supposed to provide a way out of this situation. But Dangerous High School Girls takes away lower-level encounters as it opens up new, more difficult areas - or at least, it obscures the lower-level opportunities by putting them in the same space and not distinguishing between encounters of different levels. Add to that the pressure of time continuing to progress with each encounter, whether successful or not, and... well, the bottom line is that I feel like I'm falling further and further behind the more I play, and that my subversive little cadre of girls is becoming more ineffectual rather than more empowered as the story progresses.
Anyway, this post was really just supposed to be a couple of links and a brief review of the game. To sum up, then: worth playing, not perfect, but great writing. You can get a demo from Manifesto, here.
I certainly recommend that you give Dangerous High School Girls a look, although it isn't by any means a perfect game. In this interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, author Keith Nemitz stated that "the story is about the culture of small-minded people and how strong, truthfully educated women can improve it." The writing is charming, funny, and does an excellent job of telling that story.
My reservations about the game come from some of the design decisions. Mostly, it's structured like a standard RPG, with semi-random encounters, experience, and character leveling - although it distances itself from any of that terminology. This structure works really well, actually, except that it doesn't allow the player to do any grinding.
In most RPGs, the player progresses the story by exploring a space and completing encounters. Succeeding in an encounter gives the player's party experience, which eventually causes them to become more powerful. Failing in an encounter, typically, does not give the player experience or progress the story (because, typically, it results in a fail-state, forcing the player to restore a saved game). The player, therefore, gets more powerful as the story progresses; later parts of the story open up new areas where the encounters are more difficult, theoretically matching the player's advancement.
Sometimes, though, the player doesn't level up fast enough. That's where grinding comes in. If the encounters become too difficult, the player can take a step back and play through some additional encounters in an easier area, gaining enough experience to tackle the continuation of the story on better terms.
Dangerous High School Girls doesn't have a death-equivalent fail-state, which I like. At least, it looks good on paper, but in practice, it doesn't always work out well. Instead of having to restart when you fail an encounter, you suffer some form of negative reinforcement and then play continues. At best, this negative reinforcement takes the form of a missed opportunity - a chance to have gained experience or some other bonus, while the story continues to progress. Frequently, however, you actually lose a buff or one of the girls in your party. Which makes it easy to find yourself falling behind the difficulty curve, facing encounters that are way out of your league.
Grinding is supposed to provide a way out of this situation. But Dangerous High School Girls takes away lower-level encounters as it opens up new, more difficult areas - or at least, it obscures the lower-level opportunities by putting them in the same space and not distinguishing between encounters of different levels. Add to that the pressure of time continuing to progress with each encounter, whether successful or not, and... well, the bottom line is that I feel like I'm falling further and further behind the more I play, and that my subversive little cadre of girls is becoming more ineffectual rather than more empowered as the story progresses.
Anyway, this post was really just supposed to be a couple of links and a brief review of the game. To sum up, then: worth playing, not perfect, but great writing. You can get a demo from Manifesto, here.
For a long, long time I have been intending to recommend Violet. So
here's the recommendation: Go play Violet. I discovered it through the
recent IF Comp 2008 and it quickly became one of my favorite works of
IF. It's a locked-room puzzle, of a sort, with an absolutely charming
narrative voice and some really clever writing. If you have any
interest in IF, this is a must-play. This post may contain minor
spoilers, but will not ruin the game for you.
Let me give a little bit of background. My long-term goal is to get my parents into gaming. I started on this a couple years ago, when it became clear that gaming is more than just a hobby, it's a career. At that point, it became important that the people close to me "get" games and why they're so important to me. Both my parents have been incredibly supportive, and even interested to engage in conversations about games and game design. But neither of them are gamers, so they don't have the opportunity to know the things we talk about first-hand.
I started with board games. The past two years, I've gotten board games for everyone in my family at Christmas, and then we've played them together afterward. Carcassonne, Apples to Apples, Settlers of Catan, Lost Cities, Pandemic - some of them have have gone over better than others, but they've started to give us a set of common experiences that allow us to talk about games differently, more meaningfully, and with a shared language.
So this year, I decided to raise the bar and try for some digital games. One of the major barriers I've encountered is the perception (derived from Pac-Man) that games are fluff without substance - repetitive activities designed to pass the time rather than tell a meaningful story. My parents are busy people with lots of hobbies. They aren't looking to kill time. The traditional route for incoming inexperienced gamers - Bejeweled, Snood, Diner Dash - isn't going to do it for them. They want complex, mature, interesting stories, and they want them right away.
So interactive fiction seemed like an obvious choice. Modern IF is on the cutting edge of interactive storytelling. There's no complicated interface to come to terms with, no twitch gaming to worry about. For the most part, games are short - designed to play in under two hours. It's also about as unlike Pac-Man as you can get, which might help toss those preconceptions out the window. To be honest, I picked Violet because I had played it recently and liked it so much, and because it seemed to make sense. It's a touching story told in a beautiful narrative voice, without robots or spaceships or violence. It's simple; you don't need to draw maps or navigate conversation trees. It only took me 45 minutes to play. It has a built-in hint system. It won the IF Competition. It seemed like a great idea.
It wasn't a great idea. It was a terrible idea. My mother and I spent almost two hours going through a sixth of the game, and eventually quit in hopeless frustration. She made a heroic effort, but she didn't connect with the game even a little bit. She was confused. She was discouraged. She wasn't having fun.
In retrospect, it's obvious that jumping into Violet this way wouldn't turn out well. I thought that the lack of interface would make the game more accessible, and it did, but it couldn't make up for all the things she was expected to know a priori in order to properly relate to the game. I expected some of this; we had a couple conversations beforehand about how text input works and what to expect from the parser. But I obviously didn't put enough thought into it, because I substantially underestimated the amount of pre-existing knowledge required to play this game.
Here are some examples of what I'm talking about. These are very basic concepts that we take for granted the player already understands. There are probably others that apply, as well.
Some of these are specific to interactive fiction, or locked-room puzzles, or adventure games. But the phenomenon is pretty universal. And as far as I can tell, there is a direct relationship between the the barriers to entry for playing a game and its potential for complexity and substance. Bejeweled, Snood, and Diner Dash are accessible, but not that interesting. That makes sense, at least to some extent. Games have developed a language - a set of common references, understood meanings, and shared expectations. By building on these building blocks, developers can create experiences that are more complex, more subtle, and more satisfying.
Complex, subtle, and satisfying in terms of gameplay, at least. But is it necessarily true that games as a storytelling media are restricted in this way? Is it possible to create a complex, subtle and satisfying interactive narrative that is accessible to people who, like my parents, have no experience with digital games to build off of?
I suspect that Violet was a particularly bad choice for the introductory work of interactive fiction. Next time I get to spend time with my parents, I'm going to try again with Photopia or The Baron - other favorites with strong narratives that are at least a little less puzzle-oriented. That might help - they might prove to be the right balance of substance and accessibility. But this issue is certainly something that I'm going to be devoting some thought to in the coming months.
Let me give a little bit of background. My long-term goal is to get my parents into gaming. I started on this a couple years ago, when it became clear that gaming is more than just a hobby, it's a career. At that point, it became important that the people close to me "get" games and why they're so important to me. Both my parents have been incredibly supportive, and even interested to engage in conversations about games and game design. But neither of them are gamers, so they don't have the opportunity to know the things we talk about first-hand.
I started with board games. The past two years, I've gotten board games for everyone in my family at Christmas, and then we've played them together afterward. Carcassonne, Apples to Apples, Settlers of Catan, Lost Cities, Pandemic - some of them have have gone over better than others, but they've started to give us a set of common experiences that allow us to talk about games differently, more meaningfully, and with a shared language.
So this year, I decided to raise the bar and try for some digital games. One of the major barriers I've encountered is the perception (derived from Pac-Man) that games are fluff without substance - repetitive activities designed to pass the time rather than tell a meaningful story. My parents are busy people with lots of hobbies. They aren't looking to kill time. The traditional route for incoming inexperienced gamers - Bejeweled, Snood, Diner Dash - isn't going to do it for them. They want complex, mature, interesting stories, and they want them right away.
So interactive fiction seemed like an obvious choice. Modern IF is on the cutting edge of interactive storytelling. There's no complicated interface to come to terms with, no twitch gaming to worry about. For the most part, games are short - designed to play in under two hours. It's also about as unlike Pac-Man as you can get, which might help toss those preconceptions out the window. To be honest, I picked Violet because I had played it recently and liked it so much, and because it seemed to make sense. It's a touching story told in a beautiful narrative voice, without robots or spaceships or violence. It's simple; you don't need to draw maps or navigate conversation trees. It only took me 45 minutes to play. It has a built-in hint system. It won the IF Competition. It seemed like a great idea.
It wasn't a great idea. It was a terrible idea. My mother and I spent almost two hours going through a sixth of the game, and eventually quit in hopeless frustration. She made a heroic effort, but she didn't connect with the game even a little bit. She was confused. She was discouraged. She wasn't having fun.
In retrospect, it's obvious that jumping into Violet this way wouldn't turn out well. I thought that the lack of interface would make the game more accessible, and it did, but it couldn't make up for all the things she was expected to know a priori in order to properly relate to the game. I expected some of this; we had a couple conversations beforehand about how text input works and what to expect from the parser. But I obviously didn't put enough thought into it, because I substantially underestimated the amount of pre-existing knowledge required to play this game.
Here are some examples of what I'm talking about. These are very basic concepts that we take for granted the player already understands. There are probably others that apply, as well.
- Progressive Examination of Scenery - Look at everything. Start by examining your surroundings; then examine every object mentioned in that description. Keep doing this until you're confident that you've examined everything that's visible. Do this first, before you do anything else.
- Implied Significance of Objects - Everything has a purpose. If you find a key, expect that there will be a locked door later on. If the author tells you there's a wad of chewed-up gum in the trash bin, expect that gum to be vitally important to the story later on.
- Kleptomania - A corellary to the Implied Significance of Objects: take anything that isn't nailed down. If you find something that is nailed down, keep your eye open for a way to pry it loose. You're going to need it before you're done.
- Puzzle Recognition - Understand the formal elements of the puzzle that underlie the narrative elements applied to it. In Violet, for example, the underlying structure of the puzzle involves eliminating all the distractions so that you can finish your writing. That's why you aren't permitted to just buckle down, ignore distractions and write the damn thousand words.
- Implicit Reward in Multipart Puzzles - Sometimes, especially in adventure games and especially in locked-room puzzle games, you have to do a lot of things in order to accomplish a goal. It isn't obvious that you're making significant progress toward your goal by doing these things, especially if the game doesn't give you points for each thing you do, unless you realize that, in this type of game, doing things is progress.
- False Dead Ends - In an adventure game, when you think you've discovered the solution to a problem, your first attempt at implementing that solution might fail. This doesn't necessarily mean that you're on the wrong track. The solution you identified might be correct, but maybe you need to do something else before it will work, or have something else, or approach something in a slightly different way. Don't lose interest in a potential solution just because your first attempt didn't work out.
Some of these are specific to interactive fiction, or locked-room puzzles, or adventure games. But the phenomenon is pretty universal. And as far as I can tell, there is a direct relationship between the the barriers to entry for playing a game and its potential for complexity and substance. Bejeweled, Snood, and Diner Dash are accessible, but not that interesting. That makes sense, at least to some extent. Games have developed a language - a set of common references, understood meanings, and shared expectations. By building on these building blocks, developers can create experiences that are more complex, more subtle, and more satisfying.
Complex, subtle, and satisfying in terms of gameplay, at least. But is it necessarily true that games as a storytelling media are restricted in this way? Is it possible to create a complex, subtle and satisfying interactive narrative that is accessible to people who, like my parents, have no experience with digital games to build off of?
I suspect that Violet was a particularly bad choice for the introductory work of interactive fiction. Next time I get to spend time with my parents, I'm going to try again with Photopia or The Baron - other favorites with strong narratives that are at least a little less puzzle-oriented. That might help - they might prove to be the right balance of substance and accessibility. But this issue is certainly something that I'm going to be devoting some thought to in the coming months.
Over at my IMD blog. Link.
Alright, usually I have no compunctions about spoiling a game when I
attempt to dissect, analyze, or even just comment on it. Especially if
the game, like Photopia, is ten years old. But this situation is
different, because I know there are people out there who don't get as
much vitamin IF as they should, and because the game in question is so
overwhelmingly about narrative experience that spoilers would ruin it
completely. That said, Adam Cadre's Photopia does touch on a number of
themes that I'd like to talk about in greater depth. Which makes for a
dilemma.So here's what I'm going to do: today, I'm going to recommend that you go play Photopia. If that's not enough to make you actually do it, then let me mention that the game comes well recommended. It won the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition and has recently been favorably reviewed by both Play This Thing! and Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Go ahead and read those reviews if you need convincing, they won't spoil anything either.
Photopia is interactive fiction, light on the interactive. The story is extremely linear, and although it does contain a couple puzzles, they're simple and pretty straightforward. There should be little of the adventure-game-style frustration that often accompanies this kind of game, although it is text-based so you will have to work with a parser. The other thing I'll say about it is that it's only about forty-five minutes long, and it's worthwhile to find yourself a little block of time to play through the whole thing. I played it over the course of two days, and I wish now that the experience had been uninterrupted. Oh, and also, I want to repeat RPS's advice: when the time comes, for God's sake, talk to Alley about astrophysics.
After you've had a chance to play the game, I'll talk some more about the specific things it sparked for me. So here's your warning: sometime in the future, subsequent entries on this blog will contain Photopia spoilers. And you will be much better off, as a reader of this blog and as a human being, if you've played the game before that time comes. You have been warned!
ETA: PTT! has links to the game and relevant interpreters, so go there for the download.
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