BlueCupTools Podcats! Grundislav & ThreeOhFour! Episode 82!

[Ponch]

Sweet! A Halloween treat!

[David Ostman]

Episode 82

I beat you, David Ostman!

NoooooooooooooooOOoooOoooooooooo!

Episode 82

I beat you, David Ostman!

What with?

Twice I've posted the new episode here before Grundislav did

[David Ostman]

Episode 83!

[Grundislav]

Haha you beat me again!

[Amayirot Akago]

Grundislav, I love you man, but the movies are terrible at representing Superman, and it annoys whenever someone is like "oh, Superman is boring because he's perfect" because of that. Watch the 90's cartoon series, or hell, just the episode "The Late Mr. Kent". It shows like nothing else how Superman is more than just the perfect hero that everyone thinks he is.

That aside, another smashing episode with some thought-provoking discussions Always fun to hear from Dave.

[MiteWiseacreLives!]

That aside, another smashing episode with some thought-provoking discussions Always fun to hear from Dave.

Agreed, Dave is great...

Spoiler

But still waiting patiently for the Icey interview 

[close]

[Fitz]

Today's discussion added a few more points to the long list of what I do completely wrong Basically, every issue you talk about is something I'm guilty of -- and proud of that

Good show -- and Dave's always fun to listen to. Akago is right, though. Many superheroes are easy to dismiss as uninteresting. For instance, I had my reservations about Ant-Man -- and it turned out to be a fun flick. But it does take some imagination to do these superheroes justice, especially the biggest names. I pray for someone to realize Spider-Man would do best as a tv series.

[SilverSpook]

Great listen, there!  It's always enlightening to hear from the AGS vets.

On the topic of audience expectations of adventure games, and the stereotype that p-n-c adventures are generally a series of silly puzzles- I do tend to agree with Grundislav that the gaming market of the pre-2000's had a very different set of expectations of games.  Games were things that had "gameplay", that you blew $20 at at the arcade after homework (or while skipping homework), were centerpieces for sleepovers, and mom made eggs and waffles the next day when you woke up at 11:00 PM cause you were binging on that Final Fantasy RPG or swearing at each other over Golden Eye, or getting the shit scared out of you by Resident Evil. 

Games were things you played.  Games were for fun.  Being too much a gamer "nerd" was generally frowned upon and could get you swirlied. 

If you wanted a serious story you read a book.  Or watched a movie, maybe.  That was just the cultural millieu of the time, at least I saw it.

It's true that a lot of the adventure games had great storylines, and a lot of players played for the stories, but by and large they were story LINES.  The armature set up that the designers put the "meat" on, the meat being the gameplay. 

It seems to me to be a recent development that games exist as delivery mechanisms for stories.  It's telling there are adventure games nowadays that get labeled, by both creators and players, as "interactive novels", "visual novels" or "interactive fiction".  Point-And-Click Adventures PERIOD.  Dropping the "game".  This wasn't a thing 20, 30 years ago, as far as I know.

It would seem an outgrowth of the ubiquity of gaming, and computers in general, such that staring at screens hitting buttons all the time is not something you get swirlied for, but everyone from prom queens to jocks to successful businessmen/women and even novelists and filmmakers do to exist in modern civilization.  (William Gibson would call it the "eversion of cyberspace"). 

It's not Warner Brothers, Marvel, the President or the Pope who has the most subscribers, the guy with 10 billion views is Pewdiepie, a guy who makes his living letting other people watch him play games.

So you have this mass migration to the world of games, where all the eyeballs and the billions (what is it, a hundred billion industry worldwide?) and it's only natural that a large percentage of these are people who are not into "gameplay" but love story, are writers and directors, and want to push games in that direction.  So we get a lot of focus on story, story, story. 

How can we tell a better story?  How can we develop believable characters?  Why don't certain games make me care about the characters?

I honestly couldn't have given less of a shit, and I'm guessing most people don't either, about the story of Super Mario.  Fantastic game.  I don't need to know how Mario is a down-on-his-luck Italian plumber who always dreamt of opening a spaghetti place, has a crush on a high town WASP debutante who loves pink, and is on a journey of self discovery in the sewers after being laid off during the Reaganomics-era downsizing.  I jump on the angry vampire-mushroom thingies and throw turtle shells at Little-Shop-Of-Horrors plants and all that other Jap-Gonzo-shit that goes on in Mario because the *gameplay* is fun as hell.  I don't need to care why the characters are doing the things they are doing because it is just fun to do the things.  This is a turn-key argument for a whole lot of games.

Now, I say all this being a writer, as well as a game-maker.  I love stories.  I enter that story competition thing on the AGS forums every chance I get.  I am a recovering sci-fi writer-holic. 

I don't want games to not take story seriously, at all.  I chose adventure games and AGS in particular, BECAUSE it lends itself to storytelling, and the audience seems more literate than the average genre.  I loved every single Wadjet Eye game I can get my hands on, and can only hope to aspire to that level of quality storytelling in a game some day.   

Still, I understand where the point-and-click adventure naysayers and complainers are coming from. 

It's possible to just start calling all of these games "interactive visual novels", or "interactive films", but there's a reason we don't, and I think it has at least something to do with the branding that the term "game" still carries.  Like you want to move products on Steam, and Steam sells "games".  People type into Google and look for hashtags with "games", "adventure games", "point and click adventure games".  PC Gamer and Rock-Paper-Shotgun reviews "games".

The branding, and the baggage.  Like that multi-millionairess widower aunt that is a real controlling bitch who criticizes your silly indie films but who you need to butter up and beg for funding every time.  Gaming is a cruel mistress.

This is getting really long, so I will now stop. 

Thanks for the great podcast and good luck with Shardlight, etc!

[ThreeOhFour]

It seems to me to be a recent development that games exist as delivery mechanisms for stories.  It's telling there are adventure games nowadays that get labeled, by both creators and players, as "interactive novels", "visual novels" or "interactive fiction".  Point-And-Click Adventures PERIOD.  Dropping the "game".  This wasn't a thing 20, 30 years ago, as far as I know.

You may be interested to hear about some of the stuff happening back in the 80s that mirrors some of the "modern" notions we're so enamored with today. Infocom was particularly focused on the narrative aspect of computer games; see The Implementor's Creed written by Stu Galley back in 1985 and see how lofty his goals are there. See Portal: A Computer Novel which was released the very next year for a project which is literally a novel that you "play" (for a certain definition of the term). I finished it earlier this year and can promise you it's more like a "virtual novel" than I'd ever imagined would come out of 1986 - in fact it's so much like a novel that Rob Swigart would later convert the entire game into book form. See Alter Ego for another 1986 title that steps beyond being "A game" and becomes a simulation of the narrative of a person's lifetime, with outcomes entirely decided as consequences driven by player choices. We talk about choice and consequence all the time, but rarely do you see a game so purely driven by these considerations as Alter Ego is.

So, yes, while some of these developments are "fresh" in feeling, there was incredible levels of focus on this sort of thing 30 years ago - it's just that sometimes we don't hear so much about them. Definitely worth looking at to be inspired by just how ambitious some of these designers were before I was even born.

Edit: Also, while Infocom definitely had a range of descriptions for their products, including "Computerized Fantasy Simulations" and "Prose Adventure", they were also using the term "Interactive Fiction" back in the 1980s.

[SilverSpook]

Thanks for the tips, ThreeOhFour, I will definitely check out those Infocom game.  I don't claim any guru-hood or encyclopedic knowledge of gaming history, and I'm from Hawaii which has a very J-oriented geek culture, embedded in a heavily Americanized mainstream.  Adventure games never got quite as big as in places like the UK, certainly not when I was at the age to be able to handle them.  (I got my NES at 5).  Story-wise, I was all about the Fallout(s), and Deus Ex, and I kind of circled back through the college and post-college years to the modern point-n-clicks, the LucasArts and Sierras. 

I do remember interactive fiction being a hot thing at a certain point during the honeymoon phase of the "amazing computer" in the 80's.  Around the time of virtual reality and the Power Glove as I recall. 

[ThreeOhFour]

I should clarify that of the games mentioned/linked to there, only A Mind Forever Voyaging is by Infocom - I threw in titles by other folks to show that it wasn't just one group that thought this way, it was an element seen in numerous works by numerous people. But yeah, if you missed out on that era, there's plenty of wealth to be found in the works of the time.

[Azure]

Ooh I haven't played any of those games, I shall add them to my list. I also think back then there was a concept that games were something to 'beat', and therefore to beat them they needed challenges.  I also suspect there was a massive D&D influence there with designers viewing themselves as DMs with consumers as players, can you 'win' the scenario. I think there's been a shift to completing games as opposed to beating them.

[ThreeOhFour]

Except, perhaps, in the case of Don Woods and Colossal Cave Adventure, in which case he totally completed it.

[Grundislav]

Episode 84!

[[delete}]

I could listen to them whole day! Especially during long drawing sessions. Thank you both.

[Fitz]

As with all creative people, you never know what a person's like. And, whether in real life or online, you can never tell if what you see in public is the real thing or just a persona. Phil Fish comes to mind. And just today I bumped into a bona fide psycho. So my newest game got featured the other day, which is a mixed blessing -- lots of love, but then lots of people who I'm just not on the same page with. But this guy... Comes in, all up in arms... Prefaces his speech with the equivalent of "Prepare to be crushed, unworthy!" -- and proceeds to bash my game from top to bottom, all while portraying himself as a hard-working, introspective, ever self-improving arteest and the voice of the unfairly shunned. "It's ppl like you but not limited to you who steal the limelight from the rest of us", he goes on. I was actually going to pity the guy, it sucks when you're thirteen and you make your first game and nobody notices. But a quick look at his portfolio revealed that he: 1. is probably in his twenties or older (that, or it's his dad doing the voice-overs); 2. cranks out flash games one after another, 27 and counting, in a matter of weeks, and 3. his last one got featured not five weeks ago AND let's-played by PewDiePie. How much MORE limelight can one actually physically take?
I'd be inclined to think it's just a clever strategy to get noticed. His newest game premiered just around the time mine was featured -- so what better way to draw attention to yourself than make a scene in the comment section of the hottest game of the day? But then he goes: "The tutorial should be idiot proof. I got stuck on it." Funniest example of unintened self-deprecation since that chick at a grocery store I heard yell at her kid "Shut up, you little SON OF A BITCH!!!"
Oh, and then there was this one guy who first encouraged the listeners of his show to not be shy and send in their little games -- and then, a couple weeks later, went on a twenty-minute long tirade about how he just doesn't feel like playinh AGS games And that other one, who's been planning to, for three years Fortunately, both seem more self-aware than the other guy

[MiteWiseacreLives!]

LOL, that's quiet the post, Fitz! Where did your game get featured, was this at a show or like on a forum? Fish sounds like a tool, and not the loveable Blue-Cup variety.. too bad people making free games on their own free time are robbing him of glory  Magenta eats flash games for brunch! (because I assume she likes to sleep in...)

[Fitz]

It's now "game of the week/weekend/three days/till-CROS-finds-something-else" on GameJolt. And I tend to talk a lot, so that post is actually pretty tame length-wise

Oh, and just to clarify, Phil Fish wasn't the troll I talked about. He's weird, but talented, I actually liked Fez -- a bit flawed, but a beautiful thing, nonetheless. That dude today was just some random guy.

[Ponch]

Wheee! A fresh batch of podcastery!

And since you asked, Grundy...

Spoiler

From Judas Priest's "Diamonds and Rust"

Now I see you standing with brown leaves all around and snow in your hair
Now we're smiling out the window of the crummy hotel over Washington Square
Our breath comes in white clouds, mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me we both could've died then and there

[close]

[Grundislav]

Episode 85

Man, the front page sure is out of date...