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Brian, Jim and Tom talk about beloved games and give some general background on their goals and interests regarding games. They each provide the following background info:
Five games you love
A game you wish you loved, but you can’t
Your most memorable gaming experience
A pet peeve in gaming (something that is easy to fix or avoid)
A wish or dream (something that is hard to fix or do)
What games you are playing now
[Editor’s Note] There was a technical error with this recording and some of Jim’s discussion right at the beginning was lost.
Tom, Brian and Jim talk about the Steam Summer Sale and how the Hunger games is similar to Special Ops: The Line.
Jim drove the main topic for discussion - Quality and Value in games. Is cost per hour of attention a valid way to talk about entertainment value? This doesn’t seem to be a factor with printed material, but it often comes up with video or video games.
Games as Art are great, but junk games and junk food both have their place (just ask the deep fried Twinkie guy at the county fair).
Online games purportedly exist to bring us together and create memorable communal experiences. Few mainstream games actively cultivate positive interactions among their players. Players, particuarly when they are fired up and competitive, can get pretty rough.
Tom reminds Brian and Jim that they are all elitist jerks, and Brian discusses his internal conflict when players use certain types of language while they trash talk.
It is good to take a stand and to shift social norms, but it is not clear how to find an effective way to engage players in this context.
We’ve seen a dramatic shift in the way games are supported on the internet. Early on, gaming guides and magazines, as well as the occasional online FAQ or spoiler guide, were available, but now it’s almost a given that any game with a reasonable fan base has one or more dedicated websites around tricks, tips and strategies.
Two of the biggest changes are that site platforms like wikia make it very easy to create these player-supported websites, and it is now common, particularly for large MMOs, to have the data files for the game reverse engineered. So-called “database” websites can provide a comprehensive list of all the items that could appear in the game, before players have discovered them.
Jim, Brian and Tom talk about how these changes have impacted the way we play and interact with games. There’s certainly an opportunity for “help sites” to smooth over a rough patch in an otherwise well-designed game, but jumping directly to the loot tables has the ability to take a lot of the discovery and mystery out of a game… is it even possible to design a game with ‘secrets’ anymore?
Recently, MoMA announced their plans to show a collection of video games in 2013.
The challenges of collecting and showing video games are discussed, and Jim, Brian and Tom talk about thier reactions to the games that were selected - this list is very different from what we would expect to see on any serious gamer’s top ten list.
This will be that last podcast of 2012 - but we’ll be back in early 2013 with more episodes.
In the post MMO-RPG world, we tend to make a lot of assumptions about what leveling is and how characters develop as they level, but there’s a lot of diversity in how leveling mechanics are managed. Jim, Brian and Tom discuss how leveling has evolved over the years.
Many games purport to have multiple leveling paths that result in differentiated gameplay experiences, but often due to balance or complexity/cost reasons this ideal is not realized. Additionally, social pressure in online games tends to homogenize the character “builds”.
Tom loathes auto-scaling zones in open-world games. Jim develops an unhealthy obsession with the TV Tropes website while researching this topic (you have been warned). Everyone agrees that the prospect of losing a level or having XP stolen is terrifying.
Examples of sex and violence in video games are often trotted out as the root cause of many of society’s ills. Stepping away from the drama, are video games materially different than, say, movies?
Brian laments the fact that we don’t have many interesting examples of love and romance in video games. Jim’s been playing available interpretations as they are released, and Tom optimistically reminds us that we’re still in early days as far as the medium is concerned.
Streamlining - the way the sequels of a game, or games in a genre are re-worked to be simpler, easier - sometimes even with a dramatically transformed core mechanic - is covered in this live episode.
Brian also adds nostalgia to the discussion list. The group talks about the way we hold old, complicated games in reverence (as well as the resurgence of kickstartered ‘homage’ games). They also discuss what makes a sequel good or bad, and whether, as a rule, you should play the latest game in a series.
Jim, Brian and Tom start the new year with new audio equipment, a stack of new games to play and a summary of the top/memorable games of 2012.
When forced to summarize the year in gaming, the group talks about the development of conceptual / experimental indie games in the vein of Journey and Unfinished Swan, as well as a rash of kickstarter games and retro-remakes.
Incremental improvements in game hardware (faster processing speed, more colors/pixels, etc.) are inevitable each generation, but generally don’t enable new game concepts. Tom covers a history of transformative hardware/platform features, including advanced sound, mass optical storage and network connectivity.
Jim reviews middleware platforms and the group discusses how third-party libraries and game platforms like Game Maker influence how games are built today.
Many games treat loot as another facet of levelling with different mechanics. Jim, Brian and Tom all have issues with the way that loot mechanics appear to be evolving in current games. Jim also has a principled objection to the way that loot reinforces materialism/consumerism. Many themes from Episode 5 - Grind are invoked.
Loot can be a great cause of stress. First, rapidly-levelling players often “grow out” of their loot and gear needs to be constantly refreshed for a player to remain competitive. Games like Torchlight or Borderlands also throw a great volume of loot drops at players, which requires effort to sort and sell.
Still, loot - particularly interesting and creative loot, has the ability to tug at our heartstrings. Brian, Jim and Tom discuss the Gameological Society’s ‘best treasure ever’ bracket and their own favorite in-game items.
Brian, Jim, and Tom discuss their plans to put the show on hold for a while. Jim is taking a road trip (follow that here) and Brian’s got a new baby in the house.
We intended to publish this right after Episode 19, but the reasons above contributed to extra delay.
We’ll let you know via this website or the podcast feed when we start up again, but we don’t expect to record any episodes this summer.
Fairness is slippery and it can be hard to find a definition that most players in a game share. Brian, Tom and Jim all agree that the perception of unfairness does tend to ruin fun in a game.
It can often be hard to differentiate between lack of balance and a gap in player skill. Often what a player might call unfair is just poor game design or balance.
Brian worries about players who apply arbitrary limitations or restrictions to a game in single player mode and get crushed when they try multiplayer. Tom thinks these people are crybaby losers.
For multiplayer games, open communication about exploits is just as important as how fast they are resolved. We talked about what it means for a single player game to be unfair, but didn’t come to firm conclusions. If a game’s AI “cheats”, is it unfair?
Brian, Jim and Tom talk about grind. Grind is eventually defined as time or effort that isn’t enjoyable, that must be spent in a game reach an objective, gain an item, or an achievement.
Some may look fondly (in retrospect) on past labors that led to high achievement in a game - but often we look back at time we spend grinding and wish we had done something different.
Grind doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. It’s sometimes nice to be able to kill time with a game – just like junk television. Persistent/MMO games also allow you to upgrade your character status while you do this.
Now that video games are big business - perhaps bigger than movies - they have advertising and promotional budgets to match. It is common to see video games promoted in a way similar to other mass media - billboards and television ads.
The group talks about the way they learn about games, keep up on game news (or at least used to) and the way game reviews and metacritic scores are handled.
They also discuss their game buying strategy, when (if ever) to preorder, and how they track game sales.
Story-driven games and degrees of freedom in games are covered. Is a choose your own adventure interactive story really a “game”? How about puzzle games that are heavily biased towards a cutscene-based story?
Is there a good way to classify or categorize games? Our hosts start to talk about this but do not come to any conclusions.
The way games deal with suspension of disbelief, either elegantly or poorly, is reviewed and the team wraps up with a summary of EvE Online for Jim.
The group tries to avoid talking about Farmville-type games unsuccessfully, and eventually pulls the focus around to the new wave of F2P games, converted MMOs like DDO, free to play monetization models, the “whales” that support them, and the impact these models have on gameplay and experience.
Tom argues that future MMOs must be free to play, and unless Blizzard has another rabbit in their hat WoW is likely to be the last smash-hit subscription-supported MMO. Brian sings the praises of World of Tanks as an ‘almost perfect’ free to play design.
The group wraps up with some discussion on the major technology platforms, PC, iOS, Android, Xbox, PS3 and how they support F2P.
Tom runs through a brief history of video game distribution, starting with arcade consoles and ending with digital distribution stores. A number of trends are identified: transition from physical (resellable) objects to software licenses, certification programs driven by the game distributors and the gradually lowering bar for distribution that now supports ‘indie’ game development.
This is not the oft-promised indie episode - it is something much better! When thinking about what he liked about indie games, Jim realized the aspect that he wanted to discuss was the innovative design elements in many of his favorite games.
Innovative games often represent a thought experiment or a deliberate isolation or exaggeration of a specific game mechanic or component. This means that often, short form and indie games are the right format for this investigation.
Brian also finally gets to complain about pixel art, and Tom startles the group with a shocking (ok, mildly interesting) confession.
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