Hi. I've got no particular topic I want to talk about right now, but it's almost Monday already, so I think I'll just mention what I've been up to these last few days.
I saw that non-comedy Jackie Chan movie, The Foreigner. It's filled with people who just don't know what love is. Action was okay, but felt somewhat incongruous for me since I've come to associate Jackie's fight scenes with humour and silliness. Story was meh. Seeing Pierce Brosnan speaking with Irish accent does funny things to my stomach.
I also saw Geostorm. I missed the first twenty minutes or so, but I could sort of extrapolate from the rest. Action/sci-fi? I'm not really a fan of action movies, and I like my science fiction grand and huge, so I didn't really enjoy the movie.
Seeing two action movies in a week brought this to my attention: one of the reasons I don't like action movies is they usually use some shorthand to convey character. "Typety-typety-type." Oh, she's a clever computer-y person. "Yo, I'm going to beat your high score!" Oh, he's a gamer (never mind the fact that "high scores" are nearly completely nonexistent in everyday gaming nowadays). They felt superficial and, for the most part, unnecessary! I don't know, I haven't really tried, but I suspect there are better ways to show details of someone's character.
What else? Oh! I finished reading the first Foundation novel, by Isaac Asimov. Liked it to bits. But the way the story's structured, you pretty much have to read all of the books. Or maybe it's just me? I felt that the first novel ended with no great climax (one of the characters even mentioned this). I see how it ties with the story, a great saga spanning hundreds of years. It's just . . . not what I expected when I took it off the shelf, and not entirely in a good way. It's still good, though.
Right now I'm reading Snuff, the 39th Discworld novel by the late Sir Terry Pratchett. It's another Sam Vimes story, whom I'm already very comfortable with. Pleasant and funny, which is par for the course for Sir Terry.
As for video games, nothing new. Oh, I just started Doki Doki Literature Club, which is intriguing, if you read some people's cryptic Steam reviews. Only thirty minutes in, nothing major's happened yet. I wonder what it's all about.
So yeah, that's pretty much my week. The rest is just daily stuff. Been doing Inktober, with varying seriousness day to day. And grinding for loot boxes in Overwatch (That Cultist Zenyatta skin! ARGH!), but it's still fun, since I go for just one box a day. I also had a couple of scary dreams, which is strange. I'm used to weird dreams, but scary ones are new. I wonder why they started coming.
All in all, it was a pretty boring week. Which, seeing from past experience, is potentially very dangerous. Let's see what next week brings.
Sunday, October 15, 2017
Friday, October 6, 2017
Old Games Used to Have Boss Buttons, You Know
I got into a small debate (is this the right word? I'm not sure) yesterday. It was about whether or not games should include a "skip boss fight" option.
This was, I'm guessing, sparked by an article from Polygon about an ongoing (so the article didn't spark it? I might be stupid, folks) debate on Twitter about the "skip boss fight" thing, which in turn seemed to be incited by another article from Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
So should games include an option to skip bosses? I am of the opinion of "Why the hell not?" which, I might have to clarify, sits comfortably in the "Yes, they should include a "skip boss" option" side.
Now. Most of the argument have already been said by John Walker in that Rock, Paper, Shotgun article. Read it first, please. It's better-written than this post of mine, if I do say so myself. Didn't see the link? Click HERE to go there. And I recommend you also read the articles linked inside that article. For a more thorough background, you see. And also maybe this other one HERE, also from Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Have you read the articles? If you find them to be sufficient argument (as I do), then I guess you don't need to read this wall of text after all? Feel free to scroll down to near the end, where you can find a picture.
Why would anyone want to skip a boss fight? Are boss fights not the point of a game? It depends on the game. If we're talking about Shadow of the Colossus, sure, it would be silly, because boss fights ARE the game. Without them, we'd be left with a guy wandering around an empty landscape. It would be self-defeating if it lets you skip bosses. (Even then, Colossus lets you do as you like. Bosses are entirely optional. You don't have to fight them, you can just . . . don't go near them.)
But not all bosses are Colossi. There are definitely games that would be improved if they removed a boss fight or two. The Batman: Arkham Asylum final boss comes to mind. They were boring and added no new challenges. You don't even *really* defeat them anyway. They're only defeated in the subsequent cinematic.
Then maybe we should not be clamoring for "skip boss fight" buttons, and instead demand people to "make better bosses"? (And in the game.) And we do that, every time we face a sucky boss fight. I do wish that Arkham Asylum had a better final boss. But the fact is that boss fights can always be just arbitrary difficulty spikes which feel like - nay, are - exams about things not on the syllabus. You might call us lazy to not want to take that exam, but if we don't find it relevant, why should we be unable to skip it?
So why would people want to skip boss fights? Well, for whatever reason they might conjure. They might not have the required dexterity to beat the boss. They might have missed a certain item, making the boss unbeatable without a lot of backtracking or replaying. They might even feel that boss fights are ugly interruptions between sessions of exploration. But whatever reason people might have, even if it IS silly, or stupid, or lazy, why should they be kept from playing games the way they want to? They've paid for the whole thing, is it wrong for them to enjoy just part of it?
Can people enjoy the song "Still Alive", from Portal, without having fought and defeated GLaDOS? I think so. Does people enjoying the song without fighting GLaDOS - without playing the game at all, even - take away the enjoyment and sense of achievement from the people who do? No. They might not have as full an experience as the ones who defeated her, but if they are willing to accept that compromise, why should anyone else prevent them?
It's like if I were to buy a pack of playing cards and use them as bookmarks. I'm choosing to skip the "playing" aspect of the thing and instead to focus on the physical, maybe artsy, "card" aspect. What would be so bad about that? The manufacturers are not cheated, I paid the same amount for the cards just like everyone else. Other people can still play poker or bridge or whatever with their own cards their way, nobody's stopping them. I'm happy, since I get to use the cards the way I want and need. Is that bad?
Chip's Challenge lets you skip levels! Did you know that? If you failed enough times, after what the game judges to be a fair amount of effort, you'd be given the option to skip the level (which you can always try again later). This is Chip's Challenge! In 1989, they already knew how to make compromises between challenge and accessibility. And the joy of starting a new level, getting to see more of the game, is only improved with that breath of relief. You want to know what game doesn't let you skip unbeatable bosses? SkiFree, that's what. And even if you pressed F and managed to evade that abomination in the end, that's it. What's left is just more snow and more repetition of the same assets as before. Sure, it's an achievement, more power to you if you've done it, but you can't complain if people call it boring and prefer to skip it.
The goal is to increase the net enjoyment people get from games. The suggestion was simply for developers to implement an entirely optional capability for players to get to parts of the games they would enjoy. Entirely optional. If you don't want to use it, then don't. It's a bit like gay marriage legalization: if you're not gay, you're not affected by it. At all. So why the outrage?
Remember Skyrim? Back when it was released, there were people decrying the developers' choice to include carriages, which can take you to a city not yet visited. "It takes away from the challenge! No one would make the effort to walk between points and explore!" Which was just silly. You can still just leg it the old way up mountains, if you want to. No one was forcing anyone to use the fast travel option; if anything, the game even put an obstacle, if a small one: you have to pay a small fee to use the carriages. (And while we're at it, I can't be the only person who wished, from the bottom of their soul, that we had the option to skip that tedious cart ride in the beginning, right? But if we can feel that way about the beginning, then there might plausibly be people out there who feel that exact same way about the ending. Why should we be allowed to wish for a skip button, but they not?)
Most games already let you skip cutscenes. And credit rolls, for that matter. I am of the opinion that neither of them are less of a game's component than the boss fights. Otherwise, why include them at all? Padding? "Bonus"? We should be grateful that we get to see cutscenes at all? Aren't they selling themselves short, as if they've put a great deal more trust in the action part of the game than the narrative? Believe in yourselves more, developers. Put value in all parts of your work. Otherwise, the fact that you let players skip cutscenes and credits might be seen as pandering to players who are too lazy to watch them.
The one argument for not including the option I can maaaaybe almost agree with is of spoilers. People might just skip the fights, see the ending, and blab about it all over the internets. But this is only almost a problem, or if it is, it's not a new one. People already spoil endings to movies, books, and, yes, games every day. The ones who don't mind won't mind, and the ones who do will have already developed habits that, barring unexpected circumstances, protect them from unwanted reveals. So, no, still not good enough a case.
(Now, I feel I should give you a warning: personal rant imminent. As before, feel free to scroll down to the end if you want to.)
Some people might not like where this is going, but yes, in the end, it is about inclusiveness. In my "debate", I suggested that not all games are about beating the game, and do you know what I got in response?
"Well maybe you should just play those games then, and not complain about these ones."
It might have been a knee-jerk response. But that reflex to shoo people, to exclude them, however nicely it might have been said, was there. You have your games, I have mine. Which is technically true, and in a perfect world would be perfectly fine. But it becomes a problem if "my" games happen to be ones "you" turned away from because "you" were not skilled enough, or not able or willing to put enough hours in to, as they say, GIT GUD. Soon enough, "you" might be seen as just a crummy or lazy gamer, as opposed to the real, better ones. Gods forbid that happens in real life!
And guess what? We did play those games which are not about beating them. Or, more often, we played games without trying to beat them. When I was little, I was belittled by my cousin for not being good at football games. "You can't even play!" he said. So I stopped playing football games. Played many other things instead. Age of Empires? Hell yeah. Never did beat any of the campaigns, though. Had too much fun spawning COBRA cars and gunning down castles. It carried on to Age of Mythology. (I wuv woo, Flying Purple Hippo.) And The Sims. Oh, The Sims. Didn't even use cheat codes. Just roleplayed generation after generation, with only an occasional dash of Sim-drowning. There's a whole wide world of games out there, and only very few of them require us beating them in order to enjoy them.
Some years after that, after I'd seen more games and more types of games, I had a casual chat with a friend about games. Somehow, I got out the question, "Hey do you play The Sims?" Just like that. You want to know the response?
"Heck no, I'm not gay!"
I have no problem with people calling me gay. I do, however, have a problem with people belittling me and seeing me as something less, just because I play certain games or not play certain others. And, in my experience, this "you have your games and I have mine" mentality somehow have led to exactly that. And I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one who has seen this.
(Personal rant ends here.)
Games are many things to many people. They are no longer just crude physics simulators. If there are people who wish to see them for more than what they were in the '90s, what's wrong with that? If there are people who can enjoy a game in a different way from us, why shouldn't we let them? We can't understand their reasons? Okay, that's fine. Maybe we don't have to. Understanding is not requisite for kindness; acceptance is. I am of the opinion that if we ever find ourselves on the side against inclusiveness, maybe we should check our privileges.
Ultimately, the "skip boss fight" button is, in fact, a courtesy. Not everyone needs it, you can't (and shouldn't) make it compulsory, but it's still the kind thing to do. After all this arguing, it's all still in the developers' hands. And just like every artist and creator, they have the right to make whatever they want to convey whatever point they wish. But the consumers, all consumers, retain the right to say whether a thing has value, and whether its values happen to be good or not.
Hello. Did you skip to this part? That's perfectly fine. Welcome. Now, while we're talking about games here, I'm going to share something I'm reading right now: Million Rooms Labyrinth (Hyakumanjo Labyrinth). It follows Reika and Yoko, a pair of playtesters somehow trapped in a seemingly empty game world. I find it fascinating, because it made me think of ways to approach video games I never really considered before.
When playing games, I usually try to drown. With the exception of abstract games, I try to fully immerse myself in the game world, in order to see it from inside, essentially making every game a role-playing game to some extent. And role-playing games, when done right, can reveal things about yourself you might not previously know. So this is the subjective approach to games, and I love it, for it has enriched my understanding about many things, not least of all myself.
But of course, there is another way to look at games, which is to see them from outside, as puzzle boxes. It tries to look through the art of the game to see the craft of the game, which the developers usually try to disguise and hide in the background. This takes effort. It takes experience for a player to be able to spot subtle mechanics and holes, and there is no substitute to that, barring brute force. But I don't really want to have to poke at every inch of walls to find a bug, or to make odd combinations of actions in a specific spot to gain an edge against an enemy. It is this approach that is taken in the comic, and as such, I am grateful that it let me have a taste of it.
I have only read the first part (I checked around, it's a two-parter), but so far I like it. The characters are all quite funny and likable, the world is interesting (slightly eerie), and the pacing is relaxed, punctuated with instances of suspense. The last part is, to my knowledge, not out yet in Indonesian, but I gladly recommend this comic.
Thank you for reading, everybody.
This was, I'm guessing, sparked by an article from Polygon about an ongoing (so the article didn't spark it? I might be stupid, folks) debate on Twitter about the "skip boss fight" thing, which in turn seemed to be incited by another article from Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
So should games include an option to skip bosses? I am of the opinion of "Why the hell not?" which, I might have to clarify, sits comfortably in the "Yes, they should include a "skip boss" option" side.
**********
Have you read the articles? If you find them to be sufficient argument (as I do), then I guess you don't need to read this wall of text after all? Feel free to scroll down to near the end, where you can find a picture.
**********
Why would anyone want to skip a boss fight? Are boss fights not the point of a game? It depends on the game. If we're talking about Shadow of the Colossus, sure, it would be silly, because boss fights ARE the game. Without them, we'd be left with a guy wandering around an empty landscape. It would be self-defeating if it lets you skip bosses. (Even then, Colossus lets you do as you like. Bosses are entirely optional. You don't have to fight them, you can just . . . don't go near them.)
But not all bosses are Colossi. There are definitely games that would be improved if they removed a boss fight or two. The Batman: Arkham Asylum final boss comes to mind. They were boring and added no new challenges. You don't even *really* defeat them anyway. They're only defeated in the subsequent cinematic.
Then maybe we should not be clamoring for "skip boss fight" buttons, and instead demand people to "make better bosses"? (And in the game.) And we do that, every time we face a sucky boss fight. I do wish that Arkham Asylum had a better final boss. But the fact is that boss fights can always be just arbitrary difficulty spikes which feel like - nay, are - exams about things not on the syllabus. You might call us lazy to not want to take that exam, but if we don't find it relevant, why should we be unable to skip it?
So why would people want to skip boss fights? Well, for whatever reason they might conjure. They might not have the required dexterity to beat the boss. They might have missed a certain item, making the boss unbeatable without a lot of backtracking or replaying. They might even feel that boss fights are ugly interruptions between sessions of exploration. But whatever reason people might have, even if it IS silly, or stupid, or lazy, why should they be kept from playing games the way they want to? They've paid for the whole thing, is it wrong for them to enjoy just part of it?
Can people enjoy the song "Still Alive", from Portal, without having fought and defeated GLaDOS? I think so. Does people enjoying the song without fighting GLaDOS - without playing the game at all, even - take away the enjoyment and sense of achievement from the people who do? No. They might not have as full an experience as the ones who defeated her, but if they are willing to accept that compromise, why should anyone else prevent them?
It's like if I were to buy a pack of playing cards and use them as bookmarks. I'm choosing to skip the "playing" aspect of the thing and instead to focus on the physical, maybe artsy, "card" aspect. What would be so bad about that? The manufacturers are not cheated, I paid the same amount for the cards just like everyone else. Other people can still play poker or bridge or whatever with their own cards their way, nobody's stopping them. I'm happy, since I get to use the cards the way I want and need. Is that bad?
Chip's Challenge lets you skip levels! Did you know that? If you failed enough times, after what the game judges to be a fair amount of effort, you'd be given the option to skip the level (which you can always try again later). This is Chip's Challenge! In 1989, they already knew how to make compromises between challenge and accessibility. And the joy of starting a new level, getting to see more of the game, is only improved with that breath of relief. You want to know what game doesn't let you skip unbeatable bosses? SkiFree, that's what. And even if you pressed F and managed to evade that abomination in the end, that's it. What's left is just more snow and more repetition of the same assets as before. Sure, it's an achievement, more power to you if you've done it, but you can't complain if people call it boring and prefer to skip it.
The goal is to increase the net enjoyment people get from games. The suggestion was simply for developers to implement an entirely optional capability for players to get to parts of the games they would enjoy. Entirely optional. If you don't want to use it, then don't. It's a bit like gay marriage legalization: if you're not gay, you're not affected by it. At all. So why the outrage?
Remember Skyrim? Back when it was released, there were people decrying the developers' choice to include carriages, which can take you to a city not yet visited. "It takes away from the challenge! No one would make the effort to walk between points and explore!" Which was just silly. You can still just leg it the old way up mountains, if you want to. No one was forcing anyone to use the fast travel option; if anything, the game even put an obstacle, if a small one: you have to pay a small fee to use the carriages. (And while we're at it, I can't be the only person who wished, from the bottom of their soul, that we had the option to skip that tedious cart ride in the beginning, right? But if we can feel that way about the beginning, then there might plausibly be people out there who feel that exact same way about the ending. Why should we be allowed to wish for a skip button, but they not?)
Most games already let you skip cutscenes. And credit rolls, for that matter. I am of the opinion that neither of them are less of a game's component than the boss fights. Otherwise, why include them at all? Padding? "Bonus"? We should be grateful that we get to see cutscenes at all? Aren't they selling themselves short, as if they've put a great deal more trust in the action part of the game than the narrative? Believe in yourselves more, developers. Put value in all parts of your work. Otherwise, the fact that you let players skip cutscenes and credits might be seen as pandering to players who are too lazy to watch them.
The one argument for not including the option I can maaaaybe almost agree with is of spoilers. People might just skip the fights, see the ending, and blab about it all over the internets. But this is only almost a problem, or if it is, it's not a new one. People already spoil endings to movies, books, and, yes, games every day. The ones who don't mind won't mind, and the ones who do will have already developed habits that, barring unexpected circumstances, protect them from unwanted reveals. So, no, still not good enough a case.
(Now, I feel I should give you a warning: personal rant imminent. As before, feel free to scroll down to the end if you want to.)
**********
Some people might not like where this is going, but yes, in the end, it is about inclusiveness. In my "debate", I suggested that not all games are about beating the game, and do you know what I got in response?
"Well maybe you should just play those games then, and not complain about these ones."
It might have been a knee-jerk response. But that reflex to shoo people, to exclude them, however nicely it might have been said, was there. You have your games, I have mine. Which is technically true, and in a perfect world would be perfectly fine. But it becomes a problem if "my" games happen to be ones "you" turned away from because "you" were not skilled enough, or not able or willing to put enough hours in to, as they say, GIT GUD. Soon enough, "you" might be seen as just a crummy or lazy gamer, as opposed to the real, better ones. Gods forbid that happens in real life!
And guess what? We did play those games which are not about beating them. Or, more often, we played games without trying to beat them. When I was little, I was belittled by my cousin for not being good at football games. "You can't even play!" he said. So I stopped playing football games. Played many other things instead. Age of Empires? Hell yeah. Never did beat any of the campaigns, though. Had too much fun spawning COBRA cars and gunning down castles. It carried on to Age of Mythology. (I wuv woo, Flying Purple Hippo.) And The Sims. Oh, The Sims. Didn't even use cheat codes. Just roleplayed generation after generation, with only an occasional dash of Sim-drowning. There's a whole wide world of games out there, and only very few of them require us beating them in order to enjoy them.
Some years after that, after I'd seen more games and more types of games, I had a casual chat with a friend about games. Somehow, I got out the question, "Hey do you play The Sims?" Just like that. You want to know the response?
"Heck no, I'm not gay!"
I have no problem with people calling me gay. I do, however, have a problem with people belittling me and seeing me as something less, just because I play certain games or not play certain others. And, in my experience, this "you have your games and I have mine" mentality somehow have led to exactly that. And I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one who has seen this.
(Personal rant ends here.)
**********
Games are many things to many people. They are no longer just crude physics simulators. If there are people who wish to see them for more than what they were in the '90s, what's wrong with that? If there are people who can enjoy a game in a different way from us, why shouldn't we let them? We can't understand their reasons? Okay, that's fine. Maybe we don't have to. Understanding is not requisite for kindness; acceptance is. I am of the opinion that if we ever find ourselves on the side against inclusiveness, maybe we should check our privileges.
Ultimately, the "skip boss fight" button is, in fact, a courtesy. Not everyone needs it, you can't (and shouldn't) make it compulsory, but it's still the kind thing to do. After all this arguing, it's all still in the developers' hands. And just like every artist and creator, they have the right to make whatever they want to convey whatever point they wish. But the consumers, all consumers, retain the right to say whether a thing has value, and whether its values happen to be good or not.
**********
Hello. Did you skip to this part? That's perfectly fine. Welcome. Now, while we're talking about games here, I'm going to share something I'm reading right now: Million Rooms Labyrinth (Hyakumanjo Labyrinth). It follows Reika and Yoko, a pair of playtesters somehow trapped in a seemingly empty game world. I find it fascinating, because it made me think of ways to approach video games I never really considered before.
When playing games, I usually try to drown. With the exception of abstract games, I try to fully immerse myself in the game world, in order to see it from inside, essentially making every game a role-playing game to some extent. And role-playing games, when done right, can reveal things about yourself you might not previously know. So this is the subjective approach to games, and I love it, for it has enriched my understanding about many things, not least of all myself.
But of course, there is another way to look at games, which is to see them from outside, as puzzle boxes. It tries to look through the art of the game to see the craft of the game, which the developers usually try to disguise and hide in the background. This takes effort. It takes experience for a player to be able to spot subtle mechanics and holes, and there is no substitute to that, barring brute force. But I don't really want to have to poke at every inch of walls to find a bug, or to make odd combinations of actions in a specific spot to gain an edge against an enemy. It is this approach that is taken in the comic, and as such, I am grateful that it let me have a taste of it.
I have only read the first part (I checked around, it's a two-parter), but so far I like it. The characters are all quite funny and likable, the world is interesting (slightly eerie), and the pacing is relaxed, punctuated with instances of suspense. The last part is, to my knowledge, not out yet in Indonesian, but I gladly recommend this comic.
Thank you for reading, everybody.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)