Phoney it in

"So get your ideas, stack your ammo
But don't come unless you come to battle now mount up, jump in the saddle
This is it: it's what you eat, sleep, piss and shit
Live, breathe, your whole existence just consists of this"

 

Eminem - Survival

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"I mean, monkeys and go-karts was fun for a while, then I was like, oh, you know what’d be cool? Hippos in go-karts. And I was like, yo, what about Draculas with jetpacks?"

 

- the idea of fun of a man with brain as smooth as an egg, from The Good Place

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Observation going back to my old Counterstrike/EVE/WoW days: joke name = joke player.

Players drawing names from mythology, a stable personal fable, technical jargon, etc. could be good or bad from case to case. But the ones named after characters from the latest anime/comic, or a throwaway in-joke about game loot, or random schoolyard transgression like "badassfart6452" or worst of all just using their real-life names as online handles, are almost guaranteed to be utter morons. Not that you can't have a sense of humor, but the "too cool for school" attitude generally does not herald a worthy ally. When your very identity consists of refusal to participate, why the hell are you even here?

On a completely unrelated topic, while visiting family a few years ago and waiting to be seated at a restaurant, the welcome desk featured a TV to help you pass the time, tuned to some MTV-like channel. Glancing at the latest pop-tart flavor of the month prancing around and lip-syncing, my mother mumbled one thing she's never been able to stand is a frigid whore. I had to concur. No matter how expensively choreographed her pouting and gyrations, the bimbo in the "music" video really wasn't managing to convey "come hither" any more than she passed off the generic "oooh baby baby I love you baby" lyrics as poetry.

On another completely unrelated topic, I've been struggling to get into Sunless Sea lately, and it really is more of a struggle than it should be. The practical issues I'll address separately, but for a game banking almost entirely on transposing you into a Victorian gothic landscape in the hollow earth, it appears dead-set on snapping you out of your immersion (aquatic pun intended) at every single step. I'd run across its predecessor, the browser game Fallen London, some years past. Didn't grab me. Now I finally realize why. Sunless Sea is more focused on convincing you it could do its job if it wanted to... than on doing its job.

Is "the power of verse" a Lvl V bard spell or a metaphor?

At first I assumed my confusion as to all the terminology stemmed from being dropped "in medias res" then wondered if maybe I'm expected to have memorized all of Fallen London to know exactly what the macguffins and mooks I keep encountering are. Then I realized explanations are considered extraneous. It's just random nonsense. In the worst tradition of the D&D monster manual, monsters have vaguely monstery names and dice-rolled attributes, loot is made to sound valuable via random thesaurus abuse, gods and leaders referenced in abrupt bombast failing to establish their spheres of influence. As flavor text, individual snippets might evoke terror, pity, mystery or the macabre competently enough, but as storytelling or an actual setting? It's a mess.

All your "z" are giving me a case of the zzz-s.

 

Though Zunlezz Zea obviouzly ztirred zome welcome interest in storytelling in a medium increasingly dependent on algorithmic randomization for its content, it's taken a more recent exploration/managerial/RPG to make a good on that promise. I've voiced my complaints about Vagrus: The Riven Realms, from spinning the elfemism treadmill to poor combat to struggling and failing to predict its customers' behavior to misspelling my name in the preorder credits. But I can't fault their dedication to fleshing out the setting.

Sand captain vs zee captain refusing a quest: let's compare.

Aside from smooth descriptiveness, look how many tidbits those three paragraphs integrated into the game world at large: about Thatmas' personality and hints of his existential conflict, about the mechanics of undeath, about the politics and influence of one particular faction, about honor as interpersonal instead of institutional. All that in one in-character quest decision. Compare to "generic mobsters are generic" above.

Age of Wonders serves as in-series example of progress. Even when, after a decade and several iterations, it grew into its tactical focus and strategic aspirations, #3 and Planetfall paid little attention to their setting or mood. The recent AoW4 on the other hand invests due effort into events themed according to alignment or playable classes (a.k.a. affinities)

Rhyming fey, situational humor like conjuring an illusion to play a strategy game against a bad strategist in your place, magic tomes extolling the art of their craft, ruin descriptions hearkening back to creation myths, it may not be Avellone-quality game dialogue but #4's flavor texts now laudably, consciously adhere to their fantasy backdrop instead of merely being cobbled together from random fantasy jargon. Good progress, keep it up.

This distinction between perfunctory random filler and actual coherent writing did by no means just recently crop up, as game "writers" tend to slap pop culture references together with a bunch of old-timey thees and thous (or lasers and warp drives) and meta call it a meta day. In fact it used to be worse.

Et tu, Avellone?

Much as I loved the first game twice over, I've never been able to motivate myself to finish Fallout 2. I've tried three times over the decades, repeatedly quitting when I hit a ghost or talking corn stalk or my character snarking out of character at the shaman in my starting village. My most recent campaign lost steam around Vault 15, aaand... I'm done. Uninstall. This will be the first Black Isle title I've filed under the Bozo tag instead of Laurel or Hardy. It's not just frustration. I've finished the Icewind Dales, Penumbra, Arcanum, Gabriel Knight, and a host of other infuriating oldies despite their flaws. But the adolescent feigned nonchalance rubs off on you. Jokes about graphics cards, random space aliens and Star Trek shuttles and the bridge scene from Holy Grail, the rando' bullcrap just never slackens.

 

 

If the game's creators keep insisting they're just going through the motions and can't be bothered to give a shit, why should I? In retrospect unsurprisingly given the two series' cross-pollination, the problem was reiterated with Wasteland 2 a decade later.

 

While it is occasionally possible to own such nonsense, provided it's played lightly enough, even inattentive use of stock phrases can wreck immersion. Consider one of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' more gruesome quests involving the terrifying ecorches and their victims.

If you don't like the view, try my hobbit's angle

"Ow the pain"? Is that supposed to be some obscure blurb or did you just give up on doing your jobs? Even if you were trying to lighten the inherently grim mood of FLAYING PEOPLE ALIVE, the whiplash induced by going from Dante's Inferno to Bugs Bunny in two phrases flat, mid-scene, robs the event of any impact, be it macabre, frightening, compassionate or humorous. It's out of character and out of the world you're paid to create for us.

Here's one of the many differences between tabletop roleplaying / GM-ing / bullshitting with your friends around a pizza, and publishing something for public consumption: to us, you are manifest in your work. You can't play off it; you are it. You can't act above it all; you are it all. Nonchalance is just laziness and incompetence. This is an important step in moving past the Betty Boop stage of a creative field: start seeing disparate elements as a coherent whole.

 

And if you can't do that, if you're just slapping 3D models, loot icons and copy/pasted genre jargon together and calling it a game, if you're playing the "too cool for school" card to cover up being a dunce but still expecting high scores, well, don't complain if rumours start labeling you a frigid whore.