simple machines forum

Just post anything you think is both wrong and counter-intuitive with contemporary game design.

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I was personally offended by this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnxVOUSzX4A

EDITED: fixed the link; since Extra Credits moved from Penny Arcade, it'd gone dead.

This is emblematic of everything that is wrong with games to me, level design wise.


First. This is fine, if your goal is to make a clockwork game that is thoroughly contrived, like Legend of Zelda. But if your goal is to facilitate an engrossing and compelling experience, no, no, just no.

I love King's Field because it doesn't follow this pattern. The example used in the video is if you climb up a cliff, and don't find a reward waiting for you, then your game just cheated you of something, and you should scorn it.

No. That's just training the player to look in the weirdest places for no reason. And creating a very artificial atmosphere. If you want to climb a mountain, do it for the fun of climbing a mountain.

If the game gives you no reason to climb the mountain, then don't. Why would someone climb a mountain just to perch a treasure for you to find on its summit, and then climb back down?

In King's Field. You may trip over a piece of equipment that will prove  indispensable for the entire game. Or you may struggle for hours against impossible odds, for absolutely nothing.

This is how it should be.

If you don't like that, then go make a Zelda clone, your game will always be relegated to that tightly nit pseudo-puzzle are you serious? shoebox

This is pretty clever,

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/myers-briggs-and-character-creation

Just curious where you think you fit in, and maybe someone might find this helpful in devising characters for your game worlds. Try to be intellectually honest before declaring your affiliation.

FYI: I am firmly in the ITSP camp.  According to Wikipedia that places me here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crafter_%28role_variant%29) which sounds just about right. Note that this interpretation seems to be an extension of the Myers Briggs model. I am a bit of an extremist, so I am fairly confident in my own assessment.

The dichotomies are all very central to the way we interact with the world. And having them in a neat and tidy 4x4 matrix is always helpful

EDITED: There is also this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISTP_%28personality_type%29) on Wikipedia, and probably the same treatment for the other 15 classifications. This is better than astrology if you ask me. But I have a feeling if you reverse ITSP (ENFJ) you'd get someone who is into astrology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENFJ

PS: Anything based on Jung's work is probably great for games. People don't take it seriously. But it's go to stuff if you gotta pull off a good gamey story. Maybe that's the difference between fantasy and real life.

Playing Dark Souls lately... after decades of playing games, I am beginning to have doubts that all games benefit from the "stats" approach to play.

In From' you have two main games (as far as I am concerned) in King's Field and Armored Core.

In King's Field you are a lone adventurer. A person on an adventure. And in Armored Core you are a pilot, and a mechanic of sorts, it's a vehicle simulation really, even though mechanically it is near identical to King's Field if you think about it, since the vehicle is an anthropomorphic robot.


Once you add stats. Especially the huge amount of stats sported by a game like Dark Souls. The game almost becomes a bean counting simulator. This (http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/show/extra-credits) got me thinking about so-called depth vs. complexity.

I call the Souls games incredibly shallow. They totally lack depth IMO. Compared to the King's Field series namely. But a certain kind of gamer seems to think about depth in a completely other way to this. They see depth as an act of accounting. They are obsessed with pushing beads around an abacus. This is not the traditional values of all other forms of story telling media for sure. You can call that game play depth instead of artistic depth I suppose...

That said. It still begs the question. Is an adventurer an adventurer or an accountant? To me this is an immersion killer. But a pilot of a futuristic engineered vehicle on the other hand is by all means an accountant. In my mind this just goes to the simple logic that the game mechanics should fit the game's presentation.


If I am a primitive adventurer I have no so-called stats. The only stats are the numbers of arrows in my quiver, the coins in my purse, and inventory in general. And I am not just of the mindset that stats are unrealistic or unfitting. I am actually wondering if they do more harm than good in a human scale adventure...

If you can't tell which equipment is better by looking at it, observing the performance, and if all else fails seeing what you can get for it, then the optics for that item are probably all wrong.

In the first KF game it was very difficult to work out the stats of anything. There was one stats screen that you had to exit out of and go back into the equip screen, make a change, and then mentally compare it to the previous stats which you hopefully remembered. I don't know if even that screen was really necessary.

And really if the stats make that much of a difference in a lone adventurer game then the game must be totally exploitable, and if nothing else easily broken by stat progression.

Most of all the focus on stats reduces the player to a nerd. That's what you want in Armored Core, but its the antithesis of a heroic adventurer.

Deemphasizing stats also has the effect of emphasizing appearances. So a player is more likely to choose the equipment or whatever options that they find most stylistically appealing instead of reverting to the most base instinct of sticking to whatever yields the highest stats.

Finally should the player really be allowed to distribute experience points or whatever however they want to across a spreadsheet? Or should their stats simply progress based on the action performed repeatedly in the game? And does the player even need to know where those stats are at any given time?

I would rather know that all of that sword swinging has made me a better sword swinger than have to look at a bunch of obnoxious numbers.

And if your sword swinging is not good enough to get you to where you need to go, then probably you should not be going there just yet.

Even in Armored Core there are things that should really be unknowable. You cannot really quantify the quality of your armor once it is compromised.

I mean think about it. Wouldn't it be more fun if a game manual told you what kinds of materials exist in the fantasy world. Then you could look at the item and judge by the amount of the materials that are visible how effective the item ought to be? And if its not obvious then that is either on the game designer, or the difference should be so negligible that it comes down to the player's own stylistic preference.

The text in the item's description could sum up the PC's estimation of the equipment's value. Perhaps if the game had a knowledge stat like KF3 the PC's estimation could improve over time. The status screen could simply reflect in text form the nearness to expiration, if it could not be made apparent by the player's mannerisms.

I don't know, I am just at a place where I am overwhelmed by all of the stats. They don't feel appropriate, and I've never seen a game that has ever attempted to just do without them.

Formerly: What is the nature of irreality?

UPDATE: I recommend starting with Reply/post #6. It is the final word on this topic.

This is something I actually think about an awful lot considering the relative obscurity of the subject.

I constantly find myself thinking about fantasy in literary terms. Is good and evil really the ultimate dichotomy? What about reality vs. irreality? That seems far heavier and potent to me. And more interesting.

More and more this distinction seems to be the ultimate obsession of mankind. You think nowadays sure, the educated lot of us seem to gravitate towards a lifestyle that is split between these modes of being. Sometimes reality almost seems to be purely in the service of irreality. We live thousands of lives via artistic media, and we get actual life where we mostly keep ourselves alive, the more astute of our kind allocate a good portion of our free time expanding the frontiers that we have to thank for the relative safety of our day to day existence. The safety to enjoy all forms of irreality.

But that is a modern perspective. What about in ancient times. What about religions, superstitions, folklore, theatre, literature? It seems like irreality has always been with us. Even more so perhaps the further back that you go. At least that is until the recent advent of interactive video game virtual realities.

I think about Seath and Guyra in King's Field (forget about Dark Souls for a second) what is the relationship there? It seems to me like Guyra is reality, and Seath is irreality. It seems to me like the Moonlight sword is irreality and the Dark Slayer is reality. Seath is a deception, and Seath is nature, Seath is loved, Seath is adored. Guyra is Seath's opposite. Guyra is the ugly truth no one wants to acknowledge. Guyra is not a beautiful deception. Guyra is unnatural. Guyra is physical, the stuff of light and shadow, scientific. Guyra is despised, Guyra is hated. Like I say I think in literary terms.

What is moonlight? It's a kind of false light. It's a reflection. And what does it mean to slay darkness? It means to let the light in, to see things more clearly.

These are powerful metaphors anyway. And to my mind it's really great to think of Sword of Moonlight as a tool of irreality. I think you can if nothing else have a lot of fun with games where the swords are creators of worlds and exist like a weird hologram in the worlds they create... perhaps instruments of undoing. Not unlike Stormbringer in Michael Moorcock's many interwoven tales.

Moorcocks fiction intersects with the modern day world, or at least a fictional version of it. There's no reason the Moonlight Sword can't do the same. In fact there is ample evidence that the Moonlight is based on Stormbringer. You can easily hypothesize that the Moonlight sword is Stormbringer only by another name (as is so often the case) and if you really want to have fun, you can go as far as to declare Sword of Moonlight itself to be a facet of Stormbringer in the flesh in the here and now

Which brings about the question. Another name that has been attributed to Stormbringer is a familiar one to us in the west. We know it better than Osama Binladen. It's a name with a literary cachet. You guessed it, none other than old Satan himself

Did I just say Sword of Moonlight is satanic? Yeah I did, but not knee-jerk satanic. Satanic in a far richer literary tradition. Now hear me out. Satan is a concept we just can't let go to waste.... there's a lot of value there. And fundamentalist religious people won't be around forever.

So the back story for Seath and Guyra goes. I've read this on very authoritative looking Japanese websites anyway. I can't exactly quote the games themselves yet. A god, Valad I think, could be wrong, thought that the elves and dwarves had gotten lazy, and mankind was at endless war among themselves. Valad I think is an earth god, one of a trio, who was left to do everything, because the sea and sky gods got bored went to sleep or something. Valad decides the best thing to do is to split himself up into two dragons, Seath and Guyra. I like to think that Valad is something like Abraxas... Wikipedia says:

"The Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung wrote a short Gnostic treatise in 1916 called The Seven Sermons to the Dead, which called Abraxas a God higher than the Christian God and Devil, that combines all opposites into one Being."

Usually Abraxas has two serpents instead of legs. You can think of each serpent as being our friends Seath and Guyra. And so the back story goes Seath is designed to be a figure of worship, and Guyra is designed to be a figure of hatred. Through the synthesis of the two mankind would reunite as Valad saw in his wisdom that nothing brings men together better than worship and hatred.

Speaking of Jung. I also think a Jungian approach to games would work really well for SOM. I call it extreme first person. And I like to think of the worlds of King's Field really being virtual reality worlds that are a cross between Total Recall (PKD) and Jungian like psychotherapy... which apparently equals something like The Wizard of Oz. IOW: what if the NPCs in the game looked like your friends and family? It's like the screen where you get to name your party characters taken to the Nth power! And what are ancient myths, why do we still remember them, why because they are all psycho (-logical) dramas that's why! If you want to make a good story you have to structure it around psychological phenomenon that is personal. But that is another thread.

Again, why satanic?? Well like I said, I am firmly of the conclusion that good/evil is not it. In fact good/evil might even not be something that can even be teased apart. What I think is the ticket though is reality vs. irreality, and there is no good guy or bad guy there, it's relative, just like the taijitu structure of King's Field 2. And one reality can be another man's irreality. It's turtles all the way down in other words...

The word Satan is Hebrew if I am not mistaken. It means something like "the other team" so to speak. Or the opposition. If you have two competing realities they are each other's Satans so to speak. But we recognize that video games are not reality. That's pretty obvious to sort out from our perspective. Sword of Moonlight is a tool used to make virtual worlds. And a tool to destroy those worlds; from inside the game that is; think about it. You can even compare the Moonlight sword to Shiva at this point... the creator and destroyer of worlds

Now I want to quickly unify SOM and Megaten (another personal obsession of mine) real quick. The thing about gods and demigods, deities and devils in general. Their names are always simple things. They don't have proper names, and they don't have alien names, no they are named after their very nature. It's like Earthsea, the thing is its name, and can't be otherwise...

Christians have been conflating two of their favorite devils for a long time. They've almost succeeded in making Lucifer and Satan synonymous. But from a literary standpoint these are different figures for the most part. Lucifer-cum-Satan is a fairly contemporary invention. Now I have no clue the basis for these two in Christianity. I am not a religious person though I have my private fantasies that are not entirely divorced from traditions here on Earth. I tend to prefer religion that is good for the arts. I'm into anything with a Hell too, because I'm kind of keen on justice, and I like to think that any half decent god(s) would see the utility of a hell

The word Lucifer is Latin (Rome) and it just means light. Period. In the west we usually think of light as being the stuff of the good guys. Only christians would think to denounce light. Of course they've worked out that somehow a demigod can be transmuted, perverted, by their god, but what is the literary value in that?? We already have a Satan don't we? Yes we do. Maybe its just uncomfortable to have other godlike figures taking up space in the pantheon.

In fact christians never really liked the idea of angels or devils in the first place. It was a concession to a very popular religion of antiquity that now goes by the name of Zoroastrianism. It was dualist. It has two supreme deities at odds with one another. Not unlike Seath and Guyra and loads of other popular fiction. Wikipedia/Zoraster says:

 The religion states that active participation in life through good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep chaos at bay. This active participation is a central element in Zoroaster's concept of free will, and Zoroastrianism rejects all forms of monasticism. Ahura Mazda will ultimately prevail over the evil Angra Mainyu or Ahriman, at which point the universe will undergo a cosmic renovation and time will end. In the final renovation, all of creation—even the souls of the dead that were initially banished to "darkness"—will be reunited in Ahura Mazda, returning to life in the undead form. At the end of time, a savior-figure (a Saoshyant) will bring about a final renovation of the world (frasho.kereti), in which the dead will be revived.

Sound familiar? Of course christians would not accept Ahura Mazda as their mono-god. So to placate the Zorastrians we get two angels instead. One of light and one of dark, and you can guess which is Lucifer, and which is Satan. In fact angels are pre-Abrahamic religions. You guessed it, they are Zorastrian inventions. They are like the many gods of Hinduism, splinters of two root deities in this case. I'm not positive but I think most modern Hindus assume a single root deity.

EDITED: For the record, I am pretty sure that there are still adherents of Zoroastrianism around, and they probably do take it seriously. Wikipedia says they number in the tens of thousands.

Of course we all agree that once upon a time Lucifer was #1 angel in heaven, but that he had a falling out with the god. First of all angels don't have free will. They are like programs. Whether people do or not is beside the point. So this falling out could've been expected. And it is pretty easy to see why. If Lucifier is the embodiment of sugar spice and everything nice, then he's going to find fault in a god of all things sooner or later. Because a god of all things can't be 100% just all of the time. Sooner or later you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. So Lucifer ends up in hell as the story goes. Not put there, he chooses to make his home in hell. From hell Lucifer gets to be the executioner of enlightened justice that he always imagined himself to be. And that gives Lucifer a bad image. Does that remind you of anyone? *cough* *Guyra*

And what about god then? That statue of a maiden in KF2? Do many of god's followers ever start to look like satanists? Worshiping a maiden that turns out to be a serpent wearing a dress??? Many traditions believe nature itself is a deception. Gnostics, Buddhists. Statistically speaking they are probably right on the money. We live in a strange reality that by all rights should probably not exist. Did two Escher like realities simultaneously erect one another? And if so what the hell was the firmament for that process?? If you can't meditate long enough on that to cut your fellow man some slack then maybe that is the definition of evil that we are looking for...

Anyway, I bet this has been a long post. And I bet you are wondering what the hell conjured this up out of me. It's actually this...


For a long time people have been thinking. Video games are becoming more than just games. We need a new word to describe this nascent phenomenon that will soon begin consuming all of the arts and if we are not careful, reality as we know it.

I've always thought we should just ditch the goggles concept of 90s "virtual reality" and call it all VR. Because that's what it is. Even Tetris is a reality, goggles or no goggles, or piped directly into your brainpan. Its a reality. But it occurred to me this afternoon that we have a better word, if only for its brevity, in "irreality"...

And an abbreviation does not a word make. So I vote, as the art of video games matures, and as we begin to see all forms of storytelling media being developed with the same tools used to develop video games, because make no bones about it, it will just be a thousand times more economical to do so, and there will be a thousands times more people who will therefore be able to afford to do so...

We slowly begin to refer to this stuff as "irreality". The word itself is already strictly limited to the subject of fantasy, fantasy fiction almost exclusively. So there is no ambiguity in terms of terms like hallucination or surreality to be had


The End (of this post; please discuss)


PS: Why are movies etc. not irreality? Well they are. But they are not interactive. I think something has to be interactive and intuitive to strictly qualify as a(n) (ir)reality.

Aren't video games games? For the most part yes. But a game usually has a win condition. And its not appropriate to describe something as fine art and a game in the same breath. We are not at fine art yet, but we do have open ended games with no obvious win condition... and there is certainly no shortage of players who would seem to want their favorite games to go on forever and ever.

Can something be commercial and fine art at the same time? No not really, but in essence certainly yes. This website is squarely a non-commercial enterprise. So non-commercial games are not that hard to imagine. Free software itself is about as immaterial as things get.

Are "fine artists" allowed to take their audience into consideration?

So I found myself at the mall the other day while out shopping for the holidays and ended up walking out with a copy of Dark Souls.

I looked for it in the pre-owned games. Since it seems like it disappeared from store shelves very quickly I assumed it was a typical From' game with a way too small initial pressing that would end up being hard to find in the bargain bins and demand a higher per-owned price. There were older pre-owned games that had stickers just about 10$ beneath the stickers on the new games.

I looked and looked, and couldn't find one, then I turned around and there was a 20$ Greatest Hits version, new. I thought this is probably a promotion for the recent expansion which I've heard about. Though I couldn't find a new full-price expanded version anywhere, it may be a DLC only thing for all I know, assuming I didn't imagine it.

Anyway the cash register person informed me that there was a pre-owned version in the store, and asked me if I'd rather have it. I did tell them I was looking for a pre-owned, but something tells me the store makes more money if I buy the pre-owned. Anyway I have an irrational thing about buying Greatest Hits or whatever version, just because the boxart is always scarred in a way that I find intellectually insulting. And I am not even a collector kind of person. It just seems wrong to me and not something I want to encourage or have to think about when I go to play a game. So I took the pre-owned since it was not Greatest Hits...

The clerk had to walk over to the pre-owned area to retrieve the box, and I admitted that I was surprised the box was not among the prominently displayed games (it was in the bottom area setup like a book shelf, probably alphabetically sorted, but I did not think to look) and I explained that I reckoned the game was popular and would fetch a higher price (it was like 18$) and was a little taken back when the clerk explained that while it is a popular game, it is often returned immediately because most people find it to be too difficult to play. Needless to say I had to do a double take at the idea of "being too difficult" being a legitimate reason to return a game. Though I do remember at least one occasion when we were kids returning a game that was just absolute rubbish, so I reckon there must be a no questions asked return policy. To be honest I'm surprised returns for non-defective products is even a thing in this day and age. You gotta hand it to retail.

Anyway I reckon I will put some hours into this game before New Years just because television in the US is an absolute wasteland during the holidays. I don't really have time to mess with it right now due to Ex being in a crunch, but I did take a peek at it this morning. I kind of expected Dark Souls to be an improvement on Demons' Souls. If nothing else the concept of having a more open environment sounds liberating in theory. But I'd just hoped that From' would have more experience with the new format for Dark Souls. So far though I've found it to be incredibly underwhelming and definitely a leap down from Demons' Souls. It feels like only DS players are expected to pick up and play Dark Souls. If I'd not played DS I might not even have the attention span to bear with Dark Souls beyond the plain drab tunnel vision as hell opening area.

The elaborate creation myth freak show nonsense is as random and pointless as can be, and the dialogue and setups couldn't be any more goof ball... in other words feels like Demon's Souls. Visually the presentation is still nowhere approaching realistic. Every single surface bears a white glint that couldn't be less understated and might as well be pixie dust. I can't wait for the bricks to start climbing the walls

I made myself a curly haired hunter. The other costumes I couldn't bear to look at. The hair styles even worse. Demon's Souls had few equipment sets but at least they were iconic enough for the most part, if not accessorize-able.

I will stick it out, but its just boring boring boring. I don't know how King's Field could come to this. It's like a noble patriarch has died and the inheritance is just being pissed into the wind by his hedonistic clan of know nothings and no tastes


Yeah but whatever. If you have any advice for a person with little patience and even less time taking a stab at Dark Souls for the first time your input is welcome


PS: Probably my #1 peeve about these games is not being able to pause the game. Basically a quit to the title screen is required. And having to unplug my freaking PS3 to play it offline! That's nuts. Some how it looks like the copy I picked up is French Canadian... unless all NA copies were labeled in French and English. I'm actually kind of surprised that US games are not labeled in Spanish (Mexican; if there is a difference) and English nowadays. Anyway if I could I would've liked to play in French with English subtitles so to not have to suffer ridiculous video game vocals (in a language I can comprehend) but my guess is to do that I have to put the PS3 in French mode, and then the subtitles would be French too, which is more than I am am willing to put up with for this game. I'm just glad my PS3 uses the Japanese control scheme so that the dash/roll button is X instead of O

My bet to how a Quebec game ended up in Arkansas is the video game stores probably redistribute their pre-owned game wealth. Still French Canadian in Arkansas is weird, but I don't suppose that's a detail the retail chain could be bothered to deal with.

I saw this (attached) for the first time today

I hope the organ theme wasn't butchered too