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Beginner’s Guide Experience

October 6, 2015 by Belghast

The Hype

I am breaking my own tradition and writing this blog post… while things are still fresh in my head instead of waiting until tomorrow morning… or today if you are reading this. Every now and then there is an immediate buzz about a game title, and this has lead me to be leery of this factor. Sometimes the games are absolutely amazing, and other times they are pure hype. So when a brand new “art as game” title pops on the radar I get a little suspicious. This is not normally the type of fare I go into, because I like things that explode and things to whack with big heavy swords. That said when the word of The Beginner’s Guide started to circulate I got a bit curious. When my friend finished playing it yesterday and wrote a lengthy blog post called pretentious I thought it might be worth checking out. Especially knowing that it is a word he especially dislikes. Granted when I sat down to watch a Let’s Play of the game, I had not read that blog post… or pretty much any other “review” of the game, other than the fact that there was simply a lot of buzz about it all of the sudden. So I went to YouTube and ultimately found a video by someone I have never seen before playing the game.

What I am left after watching the hour and a half long video… is some stuff I am not even sure if I can adequately put into words. Hell to be truthful I am not really sure some of the emotions I am feeling actually even have proper names. There are going to be spoilers involved with this post, so if you intend to play the game I highly suggest you stop reading. I came into this play through like a blank slate, not really knowing what to expect other than the fact that this game came from the creator of The Stanley Parable which we had talked about a few times on AggroChat but I have never actually played myself. After watching what is essentially an act of interactive fiction, I think you get out of it what you take into it. Much like “The Box” from Dune, and the cave on Dagobah in Empire Strikes Back… it ultimately becomes a reflection of your own mental state. Seeing the events unfold in front of me, I guess makes me realize how potentially broken I am inside. I am sure someone could see the experience and immediately think “wtf is this crap”, but I guess I was in the right mindset for it to seep into my core.

The Terror

The narrator of the game is none other than the author, one Davey Wreden. He tells a tale of a fellow game creator that he met at a Game Jam, and the unusual series of games that unfolded between the years of 2008 and 2011. I have no idea who this Coda is or even at this point if it is a person that exists. There are moments during the game play that you follow Davey down this course, descending into the deep interpreted meanings of these games. Each game has a supposed point, and tells us a little bit about the Author. As we reach the halfway point, there is a slow growing dread because I am scared that I know where this tale ends. Each game seems progressively more alienating and more isolating… like someone retreating into the dark cocoon of depression. My terror at times was that we would find out at the end of this tale, that Coda had killed himself… and all that we were left with were this series of games that Davey was trying desperately to unravel. That however is not at all what happens… but instead in 2011 after Davey attempted to show the games to other people… he simply broke off contact completely. The final game is a series of frustrating puzzles that are either unwinnable or at the very least antagonistically set against the player. After cheating your way through them with the help of the narrator you see a series of messages essentially telling Davey to never contact Coda again.

This game we are playing is supposedly a last ditch effort to get back on Codas good graces, to apologize publicly. The thing is… I don’t think there is a Coda. I think this game is the tale of how one Davey Wreden reacted and internalized his struggle with his own fame brought on through the quirky success of Stanley Parable. I think the game as a whole is essentially him working through is own issues, like he supposedly thought Coda was. The problem there is… am I essentially doing the same thing he supposedly was by projecting myself and my own thought processes into the whole experience? The truth is… we cannot help but do this. There is no clinical distance that can keep us from doing this. We imprint on the things we experience and we have to decode them through the only language we know… which is that of our own experiences. So if you have never felt any of this alienation or crippling self doubt… then I feel like you could probably just let a game like this wash over you and not effect you in any way. Unfortunately that is not the case for me.

The Stupor

Part of the reason why I am writing this while the experience is fresh, is that I hope to maybe be more honest about the experience. I am by nature a creative person, and everything I do at least contains a part of me in it. While I don’t blog in my own name, and have chosen to adopt a pen name of Belghast… every post I write contains certain nuggets of myself that are more honest than I really mean them to be. I am constantly beset with this desire to be liked and loved, and to find validation in the favor of others. I find myself craving attention, but the problem is when I actually get it… I don’t have a clue what to do with it. This blog and the constant forward momentum, comes from a place that I don’t really understand. Before blogging I was one of those people that would post all too long posts on forums. Before that I was a devout IRC junkie and even managed to meet my wife that way. I have this need to connect to people, even though I don’t really know how to.

I think in part this is why I find myself constantly trying to start new things, like segments on my blog, or lets plays… only to abandon them when I get bored with them a few weeks to months later. I am always dissatisfied with nearly everything I do, and nothing ever quite works the way I envision it working. I’d love to say I don’t care about statistics and readership… but there are days I think to myself… why am I doing any of this if no one is actually reading? Then the very next day I sit down and the keyboard and keep writing. I guess I do this because I have to, and I am not sure exactly how NOT to do it. My world is arranged in a series of circles within circles, and the closer you get in the more I let people see of me. However deep down at the center there is this place that no one gets to go, where I keep the parts of me that I think no one would like if they knew existed. So there were levels in this game that maybe struck a deeper cord with me than others. There was a level that as the player backed away from a stage, these walls kept slamming down in front of them… until at some point you simply couldn’t see the light of the stage any more. This felt almost scarily familiar, and like all of those times that I needed to get away because I simply could not stand any more human stimuli in my life. There have been so many times I have eaten my lunch in the silence of my car, just because I needed not to exist around others for the thirty minutes to an hour that it afforded me.

Final Thoughts

This post is ending to be far more personal than I intended it to be, but in truth the experience brought on by the game is more personal than I had expected it to be. On AggroChat we have talked a lot about how games are generally bad at emotions, but this game… has so many. For some this experience might be liberating, but for me… it was something else. It has left me wallowing in my own faults and short comings. Ultimately I saw myself in both Davey and Coda during this tale, because I think we are all a little bit of both of them. Since finishing the Lets Play I have gone out to steam and purchased the game, and it will likely sit in my library unplayed. I am not sure if I can really handle going through this experience a second time. More than anything I wanted to purchase the game as a thank you for the experience, because even though I am a little off balance right now… it is a rare experience that a game can cause that effect on anyone so when it does… it is well worth supporting. Now I am going to spend the rest of my evening trying to get the thoughts out of my head that the game so firmly implanted there.

A Better Minecraft

September 25, 2015 by Belghast

Ash is Awesome

I have a really huge wishlist on steam, in part because it is a nice way of tracking all of those games that I see every now and then that interest me. Steam will remind me through their UI when they go on sale, and sometimes this is extremely handy. However occasionally it has unintended consequences, like for example… during Pax Prime my friend Ashgar somehow acquired a copy of the sandbox building game Creativerse. The other night he handed me a key for it, and over the last few days I have been playing a significant amount of it. I remember looking at the game and thinking “Pretty Minecraft” and honestly… after playing a lot of it that title still largely applies. Minecraft is a charming game, but it is also a fairly primative game. The magic of Minecraft comes from the fact that it has been so easy to extend and create new types of experiences out of. So in the meantime there have been lots of games that have come out providing a much more aesthetically pleasing experience. Until recently I would have crowned SkySaga the king of this new breed of “pretty minecraft” games, but after playing Creativerse… I think maybe it is more fitting the title.

When you enter the game you are asked to create a name for your character and choose a simple boy or girl avatar. The game loses some points with me right out of the gate because these avatars really are not customized in any fashion. From there you can set up your own private world or join someone elses, and similar to a minecraft server you can toggle different variables. My world for example has PVP disabled, and I set a password… but for the life of me I cannot seem to remember what password I set which will probably come back to bite me in the ass at a later date. You are plunked into this pretty world with a power glove that allows you to pull blocks up from the ground, and a stick that serves as your default weapon. The first thing I noticed was how generally difficult combat is because I died quite a bit trying to sort out which types of creatures I could kill and which I could not. The other item that I finally noticed I had in my inventory allowed me to change my spawn point and plunk down a teleporter allowing me to pop around the world freely and teleport back to my spawn point later.

The Struggle is Enjoyable

With Minecraft, from almost the first moment I set foot in game… I had resources that I could draw on. There are wikis of every sort that contain detailed information about what every block does and how you can best use it in the game world. So far I have not found anything similar for Creativerse, or at the very least when I google for anything… all that returns is a series of YouTube videos. Since I don’t want to have to wade through a YouTube video to find the one nugget of information I need… I just started falling back on the things I know as true in Minecraft. The basic logic of how the world works is very similar, but the primary difference comes in the actual creating of things. Recipes in Creativerse are significantly more complicated than they are in Minecraft. For example to create stone flooring, you need raw stone which is a given, but also stone rods and melted wax. You get the melted wax by taking honey comb that you can only find way up high in the leaves of trees… and melting it in a forge. The end result is this complicated sequence of chicken and egg scenarios where you never actually reach a point of equilibrium where resources no longer are a problem. Coal for example is one of the basic resources needed in both Minecraft and Creativerse… but the primary difference is very early on in Minecraft I reach a point where I no longer care about getting Coal, however here since I have to use special expendable extractor items to harvest it… I am constantly searching for a new supply of both the resources to build more extractors and more coal nodes to extract.

The problem with Minecraft is ultimately that we know that game too well. Within thirty minutes of a new game I can go find every resource I need to do pretty much everything I would want to do. In Creativerse I feel more at the whim of spawn dynamics and hoping to find the right needle in the haystack to keep moving forward. I’ve learned several things, like how to find Diamond, but I still cannot for the life of me figure out a way to get a reasonable supply of obsidian… which is needed for most of the Diamond item crafting. One of the nice things about this game is that as you collect an item it starts opening up your recipes for said resource. Then by crafting sub components it will unlock further things that you can create with it. Occasionally while out in the field you can find books or pages of paper that contain special “fancy” versions of existing items that you already know how to create. As you go through the game you upgrade your weapon and powercells for your glove, that allow you to do progressively more advanced things. However at no point even though I am swinging a magitek looking sword… do I feel like I have made combat any easier. When I see a creature especially while delving deep into the earth… there is still a high likelihood that I am going to get faced rolled and add another “death statue” to my collection. The game keeps giving you these rock idols each time you die… and I’ve started surrounding my base in them as a bit of a sign of honor.

Darkness is Dangerous

Much like Minecraft there is a day night cycle and during the night things spawn that do not appear during the day. For lack of a better term I am going to call these things “corrupted” versions of the normal monsters that you can find during the day. When the sun raises they disappear just like they do in Minecraft. One thing that is different however is during the night treasure chests also appear to spawn, and wandering around the countryside looking for them is much easier because they give off a glow that you can see for a large distance. However to do this you also have to survive the onslaught of aggressive critters that are generally slightly tougher than their day time counterparts. These treasure chests also often give you access to materials that you cannot find yet on your own and give you a bit of a jump start. The problem being however… if you find an item in a treasure chest you have no clue where it actually came from. There has been a lot of trial and error and me taking on things just to see what sorts of materials they might drop. Funny enough it took me a really long time to figure out how to get a reliable source of sinew which is used by so many crafts.

While the game does not have the sort of food and water survival system that Minecraft eventually adopted and so many addons provided, it does have something interesting. When you are exposed to dangerous conditions you start to see an exposure bar appear. For example if you are roaming through the solidified Magma area, you will start see a flame gauge begin to creep up. I am not sure what happens when the gauge reaches the top, but I am guessing you catch on fire and die. Similarly in the above image you can see a purple biohazard gauge which is when I broke through into the “corrupted” zone. Deep under ground I found an area that had a slight purple glow, and featured corrupted trees and all sorts of nasty creatures. It has been extremely difficult to explore because I broke through into the cavern way the hell up into the air, and I can only spend so much time in there before my corruption creeps too high and I have to retreat. I need to figure out how exactly you can fight these influences and see if there is a way to counteract the exposure gauge. Similarly I went out exploring and found a tundra biome and the entire time I was there a cold exposure gauge kept creeping up. With no real way to counteract it I finally had to teleport back to base. The tunnel to the corrupted zone is deep under my base so I figure at some point over the next few days I will explore it further.

Speaking of Bases

Almost all of my time so far has been spent underground, but towards the end of the night I started working on an above ground dwelling I can be more proud of. For a long time I had a simple stone shack plunked out in the middle of the Savannah. Last night I started raising walls for a courtyard and building a proper stone floor. I am not sure exactly where I am going with it, but I just wanted something more noticeable while I am out roaming around. I want to build some sort of a tower and place a beacon at the top of that now that I finally have all of the components to build one. I am certain that once I build a white beacon it will start unlocking the patterns for different colors. The building system is pretty intuitive, but it reminds me more of Trove than it does of Minecraft in that you toggle back and forth between building and combat modes. Trove would honestly be my ultimate “minecraft-like” game if it weren’t for the simple blocks and insanely garish color palette. I love the combat though, and that along keeps me coming back… I am just not that big of a fan of the building aspect. Creativerse however seems to have that side of the equation for me, and if you also really like Minecraft, but are getting tired of its primitive client… you might check this game out. Right now it is $19.99 on Steam Early access, but supposedly if it ever launches it will be free to play. They originally planned on being in early access for 4-6 months… but now it has been a little over a year so who knows how long it will last.

Of Geekdom

September 23, 2015 by Belghast

You’re A Gamer

Yesterday I saw the above video pop into my subscription feed on YouTube, and since Pixel is awesome and was a Blaugust participant I of course watched it. In the video she talks about a problem of shunning going on in the “girl gamer” circles, and it prompted me to write yet another one of these pieces. While I absolutely see the issue happening in that community, I also think the issue is inherent in all “geek” communities, and it becomes pretty damned frustrating. For awhile now I thought I could blame it on my generation. As far as video games go, we are essentially patient zero. My folks had a pong system, then I graduated to Atari… then to Nintendo… and pretty much every gaming fad in between. So for awhile now I have felt this strange sense of responsibility for apparently being part of the generation that created this broken model. I thought maybe the gatekeeping came from the fact that for many of us we have experienced a bit of shame over our hobbies, or at least being treated to those “you are not normal” type of looks on a regular basis.

I wear my “geekdom” on my sleeve but once you leave the development row at work… I am absolutely “not like the other kids”. I have Lego MiniFigures instead of pictures of kids, and I have to explain so many of the assorted items of kitch on my desk. Weirdly enough pretty much everyone knows what a Creeper from Minecraft is however, but I guess if folks have kids… that makes sense. The odd thing is… I remember a time when it wasn’t like this really. I remember when you went to someones house and saw an Atari… you were essentially instant friends because you had a fast point of reference. Same thing happened for Nintendo, and everyone would huddle around the lunch room to talk about this game or that. It wasn’t just a geek thing, it was an every kid thing. Hell my wife does not consider herself a gamer at all… but she had an Atari and a Nintendo and played both. Her favorite game growing up was Snoopy and the Red Baron, and at some point I am going to find one for her for no reason other than sheer nostalgia. So I guess the question is… what happened?

Forming Camps

The very first time I can really remember any tension forming, came from the early Sega versus Nintendo rivalry. I mean during the Atari era there were other console systems like the Colecovision or Intellivision, but ultimately it didn’t really matter that much. At the end of the day we were all playing the same ports of arcade games, which seemed to be universally offered on all platforms. The first party title thing didn’t seem to really matter… that is until Mario and Sonic. The advertising was constantly and obnoxious and full of partial truths. I grew up in a small town, and quite literally no one that I knew could actually afford both a Super Nintendo AND a Genesis, so it ultimately meant you had to place all of your hope in one console or the other. I don’t remember any fights breaking out but it was really the first time I can remember such a thing as someone owning the “wrong console”. I had a friend with a Sega Master System, and I remember one birthday party where everyone was disappointed that he didn’t have a Nintendo to play. No one really wanted to try this “other” thing, because everyone wanted to play Super Mario Brothers.

I could drive myself insane trying to trace the roots, but regardless of how we ended up in this situation… it isn’t a great one. Any system where we claim that Gamer A is not as much of a gamer as Gamer B because they like this thing or that thing… is a really bad system. I guess the part about it that I don’t really get is when did we start competing with each other on everything. Can’t it be enough that you like a thing, and want to do a thing… without having to feel the need to shit on everyone who is doing something else? I mentioned Minecraft earlier, and that game honestly gives me a lot of hope. A friend of mine was telling a story the other day, about how their kid bumped into some other kids while on vacation. Somehow the topic of Minecraft came up, and suddenly all of these random strangers were instant friends. Games have the power to bring people with no other shared interests together, and honestly most of the people I know on the internet… I know thanks to gaming. So I see the potential that this shared interest has to unite us all… and it just makes me even the more depressed when I see people fighting over this game or that game. Does it really matter if you prefer Call of Duty to Battlefield, or if you happen to like a PS4 over an Xbox One? Can’t we all just be okay with saying “these are things I like” and be equally okay when someone else happens to like different things?

I Have No Answers

I have no real answers at the end of the day. Lately I have seen a lot of angst in the World of Warcraft community as people disappear from that game. I was absolutely part of the problem during the first great exodus to Rift, and I feel bad for it. Ultimately what I want is for people to do whatever makes them happy, and play whatever game they are passionate about. Similarly when they stop being passionate about it… it is perfectly okay to walk away with zero shame. Just because I am in a down cycle where I am not all that interested in World of Warcraft it doesn’t mean that I wish the game harm. Sure there is a bit of schadenfreude occasionally over the earning reports, simply because I have felt for awhile that the staff doesn’t really get what players actually want. I keep hoping that they will right the ship and turn us back to a game that I would be happy to play again. At no point however do I want the game to go away or am I willing to actively rail against people for playing it. I guess what happened to change my opinion… is that I started to see the alternative.

During that first parting of ways… we had not seen the consequences of when a game stops being supported. Ask the folks who played Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes or Vanguard how they feel about having a game world disappear. After watching several worlds just simply vanish… it has made me quite a bit more respectful of whatever game anyone happens to be playing. We invest so much of ourselves in the games that we play, and whatever it is that you happen to be passionate about is awesome. The gatekeeping and the “you must be this tall to ride this ride” signs that we seem to constantly be willing to tack up all over our landscape are counter productive. I original thought it was my generation that broke the system, but now I am just not certain any more. Maybe tribalism is just something that is naturally going to happen in any system when it gets too large. Maybe “gamer” isn’t even really a thing anymore… and video games are just something that everyone does. We don’t have a title for folks who watch TV, because that distinction is utterly meaningless. Just because we both own a TV does not mean we are likely going to be watching the same shows… but by the same token no one is expecting us to. Maybe we need to shed the notion that we all have this common point of reference, and maybe we just need to accept the fact that we are all going to like different things. Maybe in another generation this question just simply won’t exist any more because gaming has become so mainstream that nobody even thinks about it as an identity. Whatever the case… for the time being… I just wish we could treat each other better.

License Portability

September 18, 2015 by Belghast

Golden Age of Ports

MortalKombatVersions

This morning is going to be yet another stunning example of “Bel Wants a Thing that Will Never Happen”, but I am going to roll with it anyways. One of my big frustrations over the last several years is when I end up repurchasing the same game for a different platform. For example I owned Fallout 3 long before Steam existed, but because I wanted the convenience of being able to play that game without having to rummage for discs every single time… I ended up picking the game of the year edition on a steam sale. But more often than this there are games that I have on the PC that I wish I could play on a console, or on a console and wish I could play on a PC. Last night there was a discussion about the new Shovel Knight patch, and one of my immediate thoughts was… man I kinda wish I had that on my 3DS since I have taken recently to bringing that to work to play. Sure it isn’t terribly annoying to repurchase a $20 game, but it certainly feels it when you are talking about a $60 game. Now we get to my wish… portable licensing. What I mean by that is the ability to swap licensing between various game systems that a game is available. Don’t want to play Borderlands 2 on your PC anymore? Fine trade that license in for the PS4 copy, and when you tire of that the Vita copy.

The problem is you are immediately going to tell me… “but Bel this is how game companies make money, by releasing their game on every possible platform in the hopes that you will play pokegame with them and buy them all!” Sure that is how things seem to work currently, but is that really a good model? For years there was a significant amount of work porting games between consoles. The Sega Genesis was a vastly different system than the Super Nintendo… and we constantly saw massive differences between the games that ended up on both platforms. I took the liberty of snagging two screenshots of two different versions of Mortal Kombat II, from the golden age of porting games to multiple platforms. You can see a bunch of graphical differences between the two based on the limitations of each architecture. What has changed is the fact that console manufacturers do not have the same sort of pull that they used to. PC Gaming became a major contender as has handheld platforms, and while console manufacturers still desperately cling to the notion of “exclusivity” this is a dying concept. Systems are designed from the ground up to be essentially easy to port code to, because they know that the keys to their success is a huge library of popular games.

License Portability

There are certain games out there that you know will ultimately end up on every single platform. Take the example of the new Tomb Raider game that Microsoft claims to have exclusivity over. They have not so subtly chosen their words every single time they have talked about and used the specific phrasing of “exclusive for holiday 2015”. That means a few months after Christmas 2015 you will end up with a new launch for the PS4 and PC and whatever other platforms seem to matter at the time. Essentially what I am proposing is to cut through this bullshit and simply sell licenses that you can move back and forth between the platforms. I can see this going down one of several different ways, but not all of them are terribly easy to implement. The best scenario is simply that if you purchase the game directly from a developer, you can create an account that allows you to log in and get a new license for whatever platform you happen to play the game on. That means you are paying a non-discounted rate for the game, directly to the game developer cutting out the middle man… and for that you gain the privilege of playing that game on whatever platform you happen to desire doing so. There are a lot of logistics with this one, but I could see it working for someone like Ubisoft that already has their own gaming infrastructure in the form of UPlay. That would actually turn that system from being a liability into being a positive for users, because as of right now… there is no reason for UPlay to exist other than to annoy us.

Another option would be some sort of a license swap scenario, where you trade in one license key for a new license key for the system of your choosing. This honestly would work similar to PC software that allows you to install on a fixed number of machines. In these cases there is almost always an online tool that allows you to unbind a license from a specific machine and install it fresh on another to allow for things like system rebuilds. The problem being that right now there is no real way to make sure these licenses are leaving circulation, as in once a game is granted through a system like PSN, it becomes harder to revoke the game since you are having to deal with a third party company doing it for you. The final option I would suggest is probably the easiest. When you own the game on any platform you could purchase heavily discounted copies of the game for other platforms. My theory is that you would ultimately end up paying something along the lines of 15-20% of the cost of the original game to get a new copy of the game for another platform. The problem here is that a system like this would be rife with potential abuse. What is to say that I don’t buy the game on the PS4, and then get a discount key for my friend to play on their Xbox One. The worse case scenario is after market sales of said discount keys. None of these solutions are perfect, but I feel like if someone actually solved this solution… it would be a huge marketing point for any games they produce. I have several PCs, a PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Nintendo 3DS, PS Vita, Android device, and iOS device if you limit the search to only the more recent systems. It would be amazing to play the gamesI want to play on whatever systems they are available… without going bankrupt doing so.