Cutting through the Treacle: Beehooold : !

"Every little thing

Every little thing
Every little thing she does is magic magic magic 
Magic maaagic maaaaaagiiic"

The Police - Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic

Intrigued by Shadowrun Returns a couple of weeks ago, I decided to jump into the developer's newest production, Battletech. Long story short: decent, but far from great. More on that later. For now, let us merely bask in the magnificence of Battletech's pop-up messages.

Is it not glorious, dear reader? Does it not instill in you a burning desire to halt whatever you were doing, to put all your schemes and plots and carefully laid battle plans on hold only to bask in this message's immanence? Let it be known throughout the land that now is -- YOUR TURN -- and lest ye be tempted to dispute the fact it shall be interposed betwixt thou and thy battlefield at least every four combat actions, five phases a turn every single turn, every single mission on every single planet. And! - as if such bounteous forewarning were not enough, you also get to hail the proclamation of -- ENEMY TURN -- in between each of yours. Are you not tempted to fall to your knees and give praise to such transcendent artistry?
...
No? You're not?
Me neither, actually.

I mean, the enemy usually gives a subtle hint when its turn starts by firing swarms of missiles at my head. It's a bit of a giveaway. But alright, realistically conceding the wisdom of clearly announcing whose turn it is, there's no excuse for interposing such announcements between the player and the game, forcing a gratuitous pause at the start of every single turn. Plenty of turn-based strategy games achieve the same effect by simply blanking out or hiding a few interface buttons while the AI is moving, or by floating a message which doesn't interfere with the interface, without forcing the player to wait or click through pop-ups. Of course, making the player wait is half the point.

This is pre-game team selection in League of Legends. Actually it's the pre-pre-game pre-selection ban phase. The enemy team's five bans could very easily be displayed all at once in an instant. Instead you're made to wait a couple of seconds as the cards flip over one by one. LoL is full of such padding, especially (and not coincidentally) when it comes to opening your rewards. Loot which could just as easily be automatically added to your account without fanfare instead comes in boxes which have to be opened deliberately, twirling, clanking, chiming, shining, flashing through seconds-long animations while lasciviously pulsating counters scroll up through resource numbers like pinball scores.

The similarity is, again, anything but accidental. I could see several causes to such shameless exhibitionism in game interfaces. In a practical sense, adding complexity to displays can certainly widen the scope of what can be displayed, so there is some intrinsic justification to taking one's time and making sure the message gets across. However, it's also true that graphic designers have to justify their existence... somehow... and so long after a product passes the point of convenience and ease of use, its layout will continue to be altered, constantly, overburdened with gratuitous art major foppery. Moreover, it's also true that games like League of Legends which target a simpleminded, ignorant younger audience are always trying at the same time to simplify their product and to shoehorn in addictive hooks to retain said audience in the absence of novelty or complexity. Pinball, pachinko, slot machines, aces and queens flipping over dramatically in a video poker machine, they all bear a striking similarity to online games' pulsing, flashing, chiming loot crates.

Our brains are built not only to value rewards but to anticipate them, to reward themselves via the thrill of discovery whether it's a monkey questing for fruit among the leaves of a tree or a naked ape tracking the transit of a metal ball among plastic levers and barriers. Simply dropping the ball into the hole would be nowhere near as fun. It's the uncertainty of the outcome and its flamboyant build-up which amplify that little dopamine spike which spells excitement, and which by repetition yields addiction.

It does have more legitimate uses as well. Anticipation can add a bit of gravitas to most events, give us that sense of "oh boy, here it comes, here it comes!" Nevertheless it's a tool whose costs have to be weighed. Gratuitous use or overuse simply wastes your customers' time, second by second of those momentously flipping cards or looming announcements. As with ideograms, remember that notifications and menus should illustrate the interactivity which provides such an entertainment product's chief entertainment value and not obscure it. Your interface is supposed to allow me, the customer, to control the game, not simply serve as some art major's masturbatory aid like all the overextended animations in Battletech.

At this point I have to admit an even baser use for them is possible: the time-wasting isn't a bug, it's a feature, it's a theatrical timesink meant to mask the gameplay's various lacks. I'm guessing the "speed up combat" setting was implemented after the millionth customer complaint, but how the hell did none of your playtesters convince you it was a problem in the first place?

I know enough to expect this sort of cheap gimmickry from the likes of LoL, but Battletech was published by Paradox, whose own Europa Universalis made a selling point of allowing the player to customize pop-ups or pauses for every type of in-game event.

They're supposed to know better.

Quechu-up to the present

There were various stories a few years ago about areas of Peru dredging out old Incan irrigation systems as a low-cost solution to the water problems one tends to encounter when living above the clouds. And when I say "old" let's remember we're talking Norman Conquest / Walls of Constantinople / Rise of the Daimyo era. I just have to wonder about the local politicians whose best solution to providing for their people involved going back a millennium to, if not the stone age, probably the bronze age.

Were they lauded as saviors? Or on the next election did everyone just write in "Atahualpa" on their ballots?

Extrathreadestrials

What is with all the nudist aliens in SciFi movies?

I mean, sure, the suspiciously humanoid ones played by actors with pointy ears wear standard-issue Starfleet onesies (or loincloths in the case of space injuns) but any species lacking mammalian genitalia can never seem to wrap its head(s) around either diapers or diamond studs. Although they may lack the prudish or prurient motivations of covering / emphasizing their reproductive organs, may lack external genitalia altogether, they probably still have a social structure. A quick glance at human culture shows clothing, jewelry, perfume and various body paints more frequently serve as status symbols instead of any practical use or even strictly reproductive symbolism. Granted, our recent evolutionary history has instilled in us a peculiar dependence on and keen awareness of social rank... but then again most SF extraterrestrials are modeled on us and share the same tribal structures.

Even if they weren't such peacocks as us, all those space squids, space whales, space lizards and space ants would very likely decorate themselves with artificial reinforcers of their status. Dangly, clinking bits of rare metals, cloth in their particular tribe's fashion draped over various appendages, fragrant scale oils and horn polish, clitellum fixative, tentacle extensions... whatever flavor of space monstrosity you dream up, you can bet your sweet monkey ass it'd be stylin' either some threads or some ink or some bling or all of the above.

Shadowrun Returns

How would you like to find yourself impressed by mediocrity?

If everything's special, nothing's special. "Kitchen sink" settings like Warhammer 40K or Shadowrun, in addition to tending toward derivative Ultimate Showdowns of Ultimate Destiny are by necessity unfocused and unclear on their power dynamics and defining character traits. So by the time I hired a dwarf grenadier street samurai named Yitzhak Rothenberg, jumping the shark was a foregone conclusion. But, if I find the mish-mash of high fantasy and cyberpunk a bit annoying to get into, I'll concede the basic Shadowrun precept does seem to offer ample opportunity for character customization... for better or worse.

For anyone not familiar with Shadowrun Returns, that's me in the very first round of the very first fight after the tutorial. Never one to let myself get pigeonholed I decided to freestyle my class selection, barely skimming the various abilities and stats and relying on my metagaming intuition to slap together something borderline workable. Less than enthusiastic about what seemed a fairly pared-down character customization process, I finally just pumped up my intelligence and scattered a few random points elsewhere and just jumped straight into the Dead Man's Switch campaign. I'd say "with predictable results" but in 2013 (after a decade of MMO-inspired simplification and dumbed down "accesibility") it would've been a real breath of fresh air to even be able to die in the first act of an RPG, no matter how badly you gimped your stats.

Unfortunately, in other respects Shadowrun Returns doesn't make a very good first impression. Its graphics were clean but rudimentary (and at times annoying due to overly-long animations) its sound simple and repetitive, its mission maps small and lacking interaction. Unfortunatelier, it also doesn't make a very good last impression, given the entire campaign that shipped with the game consists of only a dozen of said mission maps strung together in completely linear fashion. Obviously Harebrained Schemes was banking on fanboy unpaid labor to supply their for-profit product with content. All in all, this feels more like a game made in 2003, not 2013. Still, for an $8-$15 title, it's reasonable.

As for what's in between that beginning and end, I'm mostly annoyed that party management is as linear as the campaign itself. Choose 2-3 pre-fabricated mooks before most missions, with one of them usually being a plot-central character - each of which contravenes my "no filthy hu-mons" RPG party policy. And yet, as you pillage your way up the runner food chain and unveil the mystery of your former ally's murder, something intriguing starts to take shape, both in terms of gameplay and storytelling. Experience is gained by completing tasks, not grinding, and both EXP points and cash were decently balanced to keep you making hard decisions on a first run.

Uncharacteristically for me, I slotted a few points into Charisma, given that elves in this setting seem defined not by wisdom but by their prettiness - too bad the linear mission trudge gives you few opportunities to put your dialogue skills to use. Characteristically for me, I gravitated toward a support caster role, to the point where I spent the second half of the campaign not even equipping a primary weapon (no, not even the predictable magic missile) and by gum it done worked! With one or two combat drones active, five magic spells and my decker targeting skill I was quite the support powerhouse by the end, especially if I had a choke point to trap with the overpowered Lightning Barrier.


The combat falls somewhere between the simpler older RPGs and more detailed newer ones. It does have special attacks for various weapons but they're unimaginative damage boosts, status effects tend to resolve to either DoTs or stuns, it does have oversight but no melee engagement so it's hard to draw battle lines.

As for the writing, sentence by sentence it's not much, neither poetic nor biting, but I was increasingly impressed by the well-balanced character concepts as I went on.

They avoid unnecessary cutesiness, scenery chewing or the usual politically correct moral pecking order. Both females and males can be villains or gritty heroes, soulful or hard-bitten. The downtrodden can be justified in their grudges or not, worthy of a chance or beyond help. For how brief your interactions are and how archetypal their introductions, I was surprised at how many of the supporting cast can show secondary motivations and other depth during conversations, especially, it bears reiterating, for such a short campaign.

It would be easy to nitpick and bash Shadowrun Returns for its obvious flaws, but the truth is it did eventually coalesce into something modestly enjoyable. Its developers obviously had a pretty good idea for what they wanted as their end result and for once the good intentions are visible through the cracks. It makes me curious to actually play that copy of Battletech I bought months ago and never installed.

To Kidnap, to Abduct, to Seize, to Carry Away, to Despoil, to Rob, to Capture

"she had an idea of love as a state of worship and service on the part of the man and of condescension on the part of the woman. There was nothing "horrid" about it in any fiction she had read. The man gave presents, did services, sought in every way to be delightful. The woman "went out" with him, smiled at him, was kissed by him in decorous secrecy, and if he chanced to offend, denied her countenance and presence. Usually she did something "for his good" to him, made him go to church, made him give up smoking or gambling, smartened him up. Quite at the end of the story came a marriage, and after that the interest ceased."

H.G. Wells - Tono-Bungay
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"My two favorite things are commitment and changing myself."

women's favorite dummy, from Futurama episode Love and Rocket

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"I'm not some rom-com douchebag who dumps his girlfriend for wanting him to make something of himself, christ!"

Marten, in Questionable Content strip #4151

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Hahaha! Yeah, douchebags! How dare you complain about your woman running your life! Don't you know you're a worthless piece of trash who should thank your lucky stars she even condescended to enslave you? You total douchebag!

But, ummm, hey, y'know, just for the sake of her-gument, let's reverse the polarity on that. Would Jeph Jacques' audience have swallowed a female character saying "hey, I'm not some total cunt who'd dump her boyfriend just for wanting her to make something of herself, Hera!" D'awww... it's adorable because she's subordinating her life to his expectations. Tee-hee!
Oooohhh... little bit socially awkward there? Are we feeling a slight twinge of politically correct superego; do we find ourselves looking over our shoulders for fear the female members of our tribe might've espied us reading that second version?

On a completely unrelated topic, once upon a time I was loitering in a university hallway between classes when a professor down the hall started shouting at one of his female students. She'd been having her boyfriend doing the physical labor for what (from context) sounded like her Master's thesis. Now, because the methodology of a scientific study is supposed to be strictly controlled, consistent and precise, this was tantamount to falsifying data and her browbeating more than deserved regardless of sexual context. It is, however, hilarious to conceive of the reverse: a male student getting his girlfriend to run out every day and do his data-gathering grunt-work for him. C'mon babe, make something of yourself...

On another completely unrelated topic, TVTropes' page on averted romances in fiction lists under "films - animation" three Disney movies. I can't remember much of Big Hero 6, but in both Moana and Zootopia all the usual Disney princess and romantic comedy tropes apply. The female is still an intrinsically good ingenue whose innate moral perfection shines a light on the evil world around her; the male is still a blowhard puffing himself up only to fail for our ridicule, having his flaws exposed by the female. He's still somehow morally compromised from the start, guilty of some original sin, so he still needs to prove his worth to, and be somehow redeemed by the female's approval. Really, 95% of the rom-com angle's still there... minus the implied consummation of their relationship via a chaste little G-rated peck on the lips at the end. This is the female gaze at work. Romance consists of females condescending to accept the servitude of males... and after that, the interest ceased.

Questionable Content did in fact provide its own counterpoint. As part of the lengthy process by which the author eliminated heterosexual relationships* and gradually excised all males except the initial (now minimized) protagonist from the comic, the character Faye's boyfriend Angus got a new job in the big city... and asked her to move away with him. She dumped him. Of course. And, every one of the dozens of pages of the grueling process focused on making us sympathize with her, with how unfair it was for her to be asked to leave the little rut she'd dug for herself, her small-town barista job and her hobby welding novelty dinosaur statuettes. Marten, in contrast, gets four pages' worth of self-doubt and condemns himself as a douchebag, complete with his best friend showing up out of nowhere to call him "a loser forever" if he'd wanted to keep his life his own.

What wonderful, egalitarian times we live in.

For the record, that little bitch I overheard getting her boyfriend to do her dirty work for her was raping him. Yes, yes, I know, that's not how we define it. It's not how the scores of campus-wide rape paranoia e-mails define it, or the workplace harassment indoctrination, or any other part of our culture. We consider ourselves so much more civilized nowadays for condemning sexual transgressions, but our very definition of transgression is designed to exclude any guilt for feminine excess. Our sexual relations are defined by a woman's entitlement to a man's labor for her own benefit or whims, by the presumed right of women to control men.

There is no ethical basis for women to dictate the terms of relationships. It should be a given for any civilized society that women deserve no favors or other compensation either for the sexual act itself or for so magnanimously bestowing their countenance and presence upon men, that the mammalian exercise of reproductive contest and courtship rituals is every bit as primitive as caveman Grog dragging a reluctant mate back to his cave by her hair. A female's instinct to monopolize and control a male's life deserves no more glamor or poetry than any other facet of rutting, and quite a few men have woken up in their forties and fifties to realize, belatedly, that the whole previous decades of their lives have been raped away by their mate to serve as foundation for her own self-aggrandizement, that for all a man struggles and debases himself, he is allowed nothing of his own. He builds and lives in her house (lucky if he's permitted even a "man cave" in the garage or basement to suit his own tastes, and will be endlessly ridiculed even for that) he raises her children (and if you suspect your wife's brood might not be your own, you have about a 30% chance of being right) he maintains the friendships she considers socially appropriate, he buys the car she wants, he maintains the hobbies she approves of, he accepts her abuse both for not making enough money and for not spending enough time at home, he goes to church with her and gives up whatever vices she decides to condemn.

All this is instinct, primitive, old news, old hat, old habits. It was never a good deal, surrendering one's life to a raptor in return for her potentially, occasionally condescending to spread her legs. But, luckily, feminists came along and fixed all that.

No self-respecting modern Disney princess would even do that much any more.







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* Even Marten's "girl"friend isn't actually female, but a male with body modifications, a.k.a. transsexual... but as he fills the narrative role of a female for the narrator's purposes, he does so for this post as well.

The Star Beast

"There was a notion hovering in her mind about them, but it would not light... which annoyed her, as she expected her mind to work for her with the humming precision of a calculator and no nonsense, please! Oh, well... breakfast first."

The Star Beast is hardly mentioned these days, and can't really be counted among Robert Heinlein's great works. For one thing its basic "alien pet" plot was merely a re-hash of Red Planet's, which handled the topic in a more lively manner. For another, Heinlein was doing an uncharacteristically bad job on the "show, don't tell" angle, to the point I could swear half of the passages must have been ghostwritten, very heavily edited or rewritten for serialization. Potentially juicy scenes are related second-hand by characters who've just come out of meeting-rooms, other characters drop out of the tale chapter by chapter just as they're getting interesting and climactic face-offs tend to fizzle rather than wind up to a requisite thunderous speech. Even the grand reveal of Lummux' "tumors" was telegraphed a hundred pages in advance - condescending even by "young adult fiction" standards.

Nonetheless, the book's better segments still hold true to the master's flair for cowboy banter and can be highly entertaining as vignettes centering on contests of social rank and influence. It's especially odd that in addition to Heinlein's love of legal drama we get a great deal of bureaucratic drama and much could be made (in light of modern identity politics) of Mr. Kiku, the wheeling and dealing diplomat masterfully holding off a possible apocalypse. But, just as with Tunnel in the Sky, Kiku being black is allowed to linger as a background detail with no bearing on the plot. As it should be, to allow the character to display personal qualities and not simply resolve to a cheap noble savage caricature of idealized underdogs. Neither did he need to be explicitly supplied with a straight white male antagonist, as minority protagonists always are these days.

No, instead of commenting on white-black relations, Heinlein simply made Kiku the African negotiator resolve a conflict against a virulently racist extraterrestrial menace which considered all humans and indeed all galactic species besides themselves, to be subsentient vermin. No further expostulation necessary. You either took the hint, or you didn't.

Disintegrate the Derivative

"When it's all the same you can ask for it by name"
Marilyn Manson - This Is the New Shit


Awww, yeah baby. High school calculus puns. That's the sort of universal appeal that's built my blog into a global empire.

A couple of years ago while visiting relatives I had the privilege of conversing with a fifteen year old gamer. (For those of you not currently possessed of an adolescent, I highly recommend renting instead of buying.) Now, though I play a great many great many computer games, I can never be entirely sure of what's popular among the younger crowd at any given moment. Though I found it existentially reassuring to recognize most if not all references he was making, I did have to remark something about the trend: Starcraft 2, Counterstrike:Source, Team Fortress 2, DOTA2, Lineage 2, etc. Granted this is anecdotal evidence of the tastes of just one group of 60-odd high school sophomores, but I was surprised at every example being either two decades old or an unimaginative rehash of something two decades old. By now they're probably all playing Fortnite... but then again there's nothing new about Fortnite.

If one can't fault teenagers on their lack of perspective, let's remember the average age of gamers has skipped 30 and it's a lot harder to excuse those who have not sought out a new experience in over two decades. For a while, one could make the case that nothing decent was being put out to compete with golden oldies, especially where strategy or role-playing was concerned. But even for the more discerning old-school crowd, look at what exactly has us all a-twitter over the past few years' revival. A new Torment game? A Baldur's Gate sequel? Another Baldur's Gate sequel? A System Shock sequel? A Bloodlines sequel? Two Wasteland sequels? A remake of Master of Orion? Civilization 666?

Granted, we're also waiting for Cyberpunk 2077, Stellaris made quite a splash and for all its unplayability No Man's Sky was its own thing. Still, what could better emphasize Hollywood envy than copying Hollywood's lack of creativity: an industry which churns out nothing but sequels and remakes and remakes of sequels and sequels of remakes and sequential re-mocks of sequelae.

It's kind of weird from one point of view, as the game industry is now more profitable than the movie industry, so if anything, Hollywood should have game envy. And it does. Yet, still, there's a pop culture dilution to Hollywood glitz which every other entertainment industry struggles to emulate: awards shows, trailers, star power... induced audience passivity and sheepishness. To what extent are modern games per totum derivative of movie-watching, and can they ever outgrow it?

Dawn of Morons

I've been taking another look at Dawn of Man recently, and generally approve of how it's been fleshed out since release. More animal variety, more buildings, and even the aggravating villager AI is coming along... barely, but noticeably. But when it comes to quality of life UI improvements, there is such a thing as taking it too far:

Seriously ?!?
You need the UI to automatically subtract your population from your capacity? When you'll spend most of the game not even breaking into triple digits? How can the target audience for such a game possibly be incapable of first grade arithmetic?

There were real stone-age villagers 15,000 years ago with better math skills than this!

To the Moon - with this junk

What an infuriating, overblown, pointless little waste of time and money. I won't bother with screenshots for this so-called game. They're fuckin' chibis; nothing worth seeing.

Computer games are no less prone to hipsterism than any other medium, resulting in a great many products posturing as artsy and soulful though aggressively bereft of any discernible quality or originality. After all, as long as it has no qualities as a game, its players cannot be accused of being gamers and the activity itself must represent some other, transcendent interest. Right? Right! Vapid, pretentious crap will always find an audience.

So let's not spend too much time on To the Moon's inevitable lack of player choice, or on its simplistic card-flipping excuse for puzzles. This is a click-through "game" and though others of its ilk might redeem themselves by immersive atmosphere, beautiful artwork, complex characters and/or storytelling or gut-wrenching ethical and emotional decisions, it's amazing how deliberately this one avoids trying. In fact it's hard even talking about it because there is nothing to talk about. I've played 3/4 of the way through and feel completely unmotivated to finish the stupid thing.

Visually, it's nothing but pixelated chibis in a painfully mundane locale. Its soulful piano score sounds decent at first but soon grates by simplicity and repetition, and the few other canned sound effects don't help. Worst of all, its much lauded storytelling resolves to simply shoving a few blatantly obvious set pieces in the player's face and demanding stock emotional reactions. The plot would fit fine into a half-page piece of emotionally biting flash fiction (I've attempted a couple of them on this very site) but is painfully overstretched for hours' worth of gameplay. The dialogue is... awkward, disjointed, sparse with nonsensical segues and never really lending any of the characters individual personalities. It's a good thing the mildly autistic one keeps being described as such because you sure as hell couldn't discern that from speech bubbles.

For instance, here's a reply to a question about working overtime, early in the game:
"You know the answer, you stupid owl."
Ooo-kaaaayyy...
Now, yes, there's some symbolism there, owl, night shifts, we get it. It is not complicated. It is also completely irrelevant, neither expressive nor clever enough to have ever made it past a first draft. The "stupid" part makes it too abusive for friendly banter, the "owl" part makes it too lame for a witty comeback. The English word owl lacks the sonority to make an impact by itself, which is why it's always paired as a descriptor with harsher or more strident nights or Creek Bridges. That's either a case of incompetent translation or hopelessly incompetent writing - and given that the entire script sounds like that, I'm leaning toward the latter.

What To the Moon does have is a couple of segments ridiculing game tropes, like a comment to "google it" in response to a trivia question or a jab at RPGs' combat encounters. Nothing like "going meta" for critic bait. This piece of dross advertises itself thus:
"Winner of multiple awards such as Wired’s Top 20 Games of 2011, Gamespot’s Best Story of 2011, and IndieDB’s Editor’s Choice Award for Indie of the Year 2011"

Well, thanks for nothing Wired, Gamespot and IndieDB. I guess we know what your reviewing's worth.

YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL