Cutting through the Treacle: The Tabletop Fetish

"You said that irony was the shackles of youth"

R.E.M. - What's the Frequency, Kenneth?, 1994

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"Are you being sarcastic, dude?"

"I don't even know anymore."

 

The Simpsons, 1995

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On the lookout for any system to replace the increasingly obsolete D&D routine, I recently gave Gloomhaven a try.

If you get that character reference, you're too old.

To be fair there's quite a bit of potential there, but it's still fairly primitive with a tabletop version apparently not even a decade old. Leaving most of my bitching for some future date, I'm just amazed at how hard the computer adaptation works at preventing me from getting into it with an utterly bewildering interface feeling like it was designed by whichever librarian won the "most anal-retentive" award in 1973.

 

Sure, you've got the usual amateur designer pitfalls like the camera turning on its own or overextended animations for mundane actions like bending over to pick up coins.

 

Then it makes you pause to confirm the beginning of a new round like Battletech and lacks context-sensitive single-click shortcuts or double-clicks, making you separately confirm every action. And you can't click your other card to change action, have to manually un-click your current one. And you can't just spacebar-end a character's turn; must officially pass your remaining card and confirm. And you can restart round on your character's action but not if you're in the 'thinking' step of selecting an action.

 

But even beyond all that inexcusable stuttering, Gloomhaven's design enters a Very Special Boy category few others have managed to crater their way into. You kinda have to see it to believe it.

Yes, it makes you manually confirm your armour soak on every damaging attack. Wait! Oh god, oh god, oh god, did I remember to breathe and perspire this round?!?

 

So screw that, instead I've been devoting more time to Wildermyth, which will warrant more discussion of its greater creativity (even if it does stumble a bit in execution)

If anything even lower-budget and lower-tech than Gloomhaven, invoking 2D construction paper visuals much like Shelter did, and for the same old-timey storybook atmosphere. Or maybe its creators just watched The Secret of Kells one too many times. Look, at least they ain't chibis. It's a rare "back to basics" game which successfully revisits the core interactivity of the medium, placing heavy emphasis on your pieces clacking from square to square on a board and units and buffs being represented by "cards"

- but it's also significantly more playable than the first example, with more informative tooltips and more fluid commands.
 

On a completely unrelated topic, though I've been burned by Kickstarter projects several times (fuck Mark Jacobs) I got two e-mails in the past month from games I'm currently backing. One gaggle of fringe developers lamented their publisher deals all fell through and they're strapped for cash, laying off part of their team. The others bragged they've now implemented dice in their game. Colored dice! Rolling! Sparkling! Rolling sparkling colored polyhedral pixels! Never in the history of the Arr Enn Gee hath The Number been graced with such grace and gravitas!

 

I shouldn't have to reiterate my distaste for retro games, but they overlap so heavily with the turn-based or narrative-driven genres I favor that I keep running into this utterly shallow in-group appeal. I'm not buying a game about spaceships or fireball slinging to pretend I'm sitting around a table with a bunch of other apes. I'm not in it for the hipster meta-enjoyment of pre-post-ironic non-content. I'm not buying an escapist fantasy to pretend I'm pretending, but to pretend. That shouldn't be so fine a distinction. No cards. No dice. No placemats. No putting my little soldier figurines on plastic bases. Get that shit off my screen. 

It's like fetish porn. You know when you've hit the paraphiliac threshold because a minor detail begins replacing the core activity, be it humping or clicking. You expect a pornstar to have feet, you'd find it odd if they were missing, but you can also spot a foot fetish video if one pops up. Both extremes veer off the mark. Something in Gloomhaven's basic design philosophy emphasizes the wrong visual or interactive elements, consistently and intrusively. It makes you pause for cards to flips over, makes you backtrack through actions as if you're taking the time to physically put a card back in the deck, makes you confirm every sub-step of every step of every action every round as if the mechanical manipulation of imaginary cardboard and plastic were in itself your dungeoneering adventure. Wildermyth places you on a table with cards as well, but after that no longer belabors the point. It's still gratuitous, you can tell the fetish element has been included, but at least there's more to it than feet!

 

Yes, grids look like game boards. So? Yes, the small number randomization or random action drawing of tactical games obviously originated with dice and cards before it was electronic. So? An adaptation can never be a carbon-copy. You're making something that has to function here and now, on the screen, by the rules of electronic interaction, not by the rules of drunken munchkins smearing pizza grease onto cardboard. In 1993 Solitaire may well have been the most played game on Windows. There are reasons thats no longer the case!

 

You hit peak absurdity when you see start-ups on a shoestring budget selling Kickstarter stretch goals of dice animations and plastic feelies mailed to its audience. Could you have paid one more programmer for one more month with that cash? Three months? Look over at your neighbours packing their bindles and tell me again if you can afford to deliver a non-functional product for the sake of a handful of foot fetishists, when your entire industry's already in danger of getting automated into irrelevance.

Cutting through the Treacle: Raiders of the Leisure Park

"He did pretend to play golf, but he could not see any particular point in stopping a good walk to wallop small balls"

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

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"The more you suffer

The more it shows you really care"

 

The Offspring - Self Esteem

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"There seems a broad consensus not even so much that work is good but that not working is very bad; that anyone who is not slaving away harder than he'd like at something he doesn't especially enjoy is a bad person, a scrounger, a skiver, a contemptible parasite unworthy of sympathy or public relief."

[...]

[Citing an interviewee] "it is one of the guiding principles of social relations here: if you're not destroying  your mind and body via paid work, you're not living right."

David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs

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"He had no pride in his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not doing certain things and hard work. [...] There was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in that system of inversion."

H.G. Wells - Tono-Bungay

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I still play Northgard occasionally. While hardly the best strategy game, it continues to bait me into reinstalling every year or so. Then I end up uninstalling it for annoyance at its combat mechanics and the computer cheating as it usually does in such games. I especially hate it including a designated griefer class.

As the raven clan represents The All-Father himself, you might excuse a bit of overpower. The problem being they gave it a lot more bit. Its main gimmick is sending boats of mercenaries to raid any player at any time. Attacking without risking its own population would be a powerful enough ability in itself (the lynx clan gets by well enough with that alone) but the mercs are dirt-cheap, roughly match the growth curve of a faction's military by themselves, and give only a three-second warning when they're about to hit, giving the defender no chance to relocate his army which is probably at the other end of his territory since the shore is every player's starting zone. Sure, you can relocate your workers and let the raid complete, but simply losing access to that resource production for the duration is, again, a hefty punishment in itself. Most relevant to my upcoming point, these attacks can be spammed. You'll likely get hit more often by raven raids than by every other source put together.

 

But of course there's more to it than just giving Odin his due pomp and circumstance bonus. To game designers, the spam is a goal in itself.

 

Old World, another strategy game, turn-based this time, reminded me of this while bashing my head against it trying to actually finish a match with Hatti. The principal issue being that sometime during the past year, Mohawk ramped up one of their more annoying features I'd previously held off on disabling, distant raids. Basically, cities at the edge of the map (which would otherwise be relatively safe) get randomly hit with barbarian invasions from offscreen. Stronger ones, in fact, than you would encounter when fighting an actual barbarian city present on the map. Note the five units coming in at the top of the image, the devastation from the previous five units I'd wiped out during the last two turns, and if you check the minimap, five more little red dots below the visible area. What was once an occasional three-mook digression is now forcing you to divert all your military forces, if you can even afford it. A fifteen-mook pile-up is more or less... a war.

For a bonus, when I hit the main menu to disable the stupid raids, I discovered this previously separate mechanic had been folded into the general "difficulty" setting, making it impossible to, say, play under the harsher resource handicap without also accepting the pop-up barbies. Note they actually went out of their way to remove that setting after implementation, to restrict players' options years after the fact. This also came at the same time that raider AI was tweaked to have them prioritize causing random damage instead of trying to beat your defenders (a.k.a. griefing) and soon after disasters were implemented, which also break random improvements requiring reconstruction. Triple redundancy, all toward randomly breaking your shit with no recourse.

 

A quarter century ago, or certainly by the era of Civilizations 3 and 4, developers had gradually begun phasing out the old '90s "whack-a-mole" mechanics (like the series' nuclear fallout requiring individual cleanup) in favor of rarer events more threatening individually but less of a constant chore. Now it appears the moles are back in town.

Why?

 

I mean, sure, from the company's point of view, never ignore the timesink factor. Every designer, every screenwriter, every Dickens loves 'em sum filler, and the raids increase the number of clicks required to get through the middle portion (expand > exploit) of a campaign. Also, the newer generation of strategy games all introduce a limiting resource which cannot be increased by normal territorial/economic expansion to put the brakes on players' steamrolling. Old World's answer to AoW4 / Stellaris' influence or EU4's monarch powers is Orders, and nothing eats up orders faster than fighting. Problem being this so artificially yanks that choke-chain around players' necks that one would think they'd protest the change. Do they?

 

I caused a bit of indignation on an MMO guild forum some 15-20(?) years ago when some cretin demanded to know "you think you better than us" and I replied "yes, because I make things harder for myself" and in my defense I did not in fact consider this so heinous a departure from mundane gamer braggadocio. Every schmuck brags about having beaten difficulty level N+1. Was it so different from me refusing to use an overpowered item in order to beat difficulty N? Because I'm really quite good at making my own life harder; you don't have to help me with that. In Old World, in fact, I roleplay and self-handicap by establishing perennial Platonic philosopher king rule. (One reason I hatey Hatti is that it lacks a researcher family, but I make do with bureaucrats.) This blocks me from what gameplay options Scholar heads of state cannot undertake (like proposing alliances) and imposes a constantly mounting relations penalty from the two families whose purpurous keisters shalt never toucheth the ivory throne of academe, eventually resulting in rebel units spawning at their cities. In other words, I make my own distant raids.

 

I don't doubt that if I shop around I will find more examples of random spawns and other busywork being re-added to various genres. It fits too well with other idiot-friendly trends of the past few years like the decline of online FPS back to deathmatch or the final replacement of ever-shrinking MMO raids with individual Diablo-clone loot grinding.

 

So sure, idiot-friendly simplification is one issue, and those same idiots tend to interpret hyperactivity as excitement, and repetition can be addictive... but is that all? Because I think Old World has finally elucidated the real outrage I caused on that forum back around 2009. It wasn't about who's playing the more difficult challenge. It's the 'for myself' that rankled most. Playing an unoptimized build, giving my fighter 14 STR instead of 18, denying the desirability of the supposed 'best' status symbols for which others struggle. Smashing their tablets of virtues. All so evil.

 

Because to the average retard, all definitions must be imposed from above. The value of effort in a game is no different from the value of effort in real life, that is to say a reflection of one's affiliation with the apes at the top of the tribe's power hierarchy. So just as in real life 'work' does not count as such unless it is servitude to multibillionnaires, playing a game gets defined not by an objective weighing and multifaceted combination of advantages and handicaps, of what would make for interesting gameplay, but by ticking off lists of achievements and top scores arbitrarily defined by the marketing department. At the same time, note the powergamer outrage at anyone refusing to take every obvious advantage (e.g. min-maxing stats) despite such advantages again being defined and handed out by authority and not a reflection of the player's creativity. They want to be made to work at the game just as they play at working the job they are made to keep in meatspace. It's Nietzschean slave morality at its basest, defining oneself by the master's goals, and it's hardly the first time I've cited this tendency in computer games. *

 

It's funny, when MMOs first came out shortly before Y2K with their initial subscription models, the sheer effort involved prompted many to decry "that sounds like a second job more than a game" yet a quarter century later the only facet of online games which remains is the job aspect. Gone are forty-man raids and organization and complex character builds and malleable playable worlds. Now just do what you're told. Punch the clock religiously for your daily log-in rewards. Kill ten to the tenth rats for an achievement unlock. Cheat and sabotage your coworkers. Powerlevel. Grind the single easiest instance for constant loot. After a brief revival of more interesting gameplay around the mid-2010s, the same pattern is reasserting itself in single-player. No complex morality, no complex narratives, no complex goals. Goblin pops up. Smack it with a mallet. Get a LEVEL UP! message.

 

Sure, it's only one facet of our society-wide decline. Humans are less and less self-directed in their thoughts and actions, led by the nose by religious indoctrination and state propaganda and advertising and more recently social media echo chambers and even more recently copy-pasting chatbots. But observing how thoroughly it pervades even our escapist fantasies gives the lie to accusations of nefarious manipulation from above. It sells. It's the rabble dragging us down. It is the human animal, the naked ape which does not want to think and continually retrenches in mindless reaction of its own accord. Subhumanity kills.

 

 

 

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* If you don't think games reflect the morality of our corporate overlords, lemme ask ya this: have any of your Civilizations ever hit a crisis of overproduction? Or is maximizing profit and extracted labor always the right answer?

(There is one golden oldie which slightly bucked the trend, Alpha Centauri and Planet's revolt against industry.)

Cutting through the Treacle: AlzRAMmer's Disease

"So tell me, who are you dissing or maybe I'm missing

The reason that you're smiling or wilding

[...]

This time, this time I'm losing my mind"

 

Beastie Boys - So What'Cha Want

 

 

(working title: I Am My Own Grandpa, Redux)

 

Sometime in recent months, League of Legends began saving your role selection while queuing up for a match. Apparently after fourteen years of unjustifiably dominating the AoS market, they finally sussed out that players in class-based games tend to play their favorite classes repeatedly. You don't say. (ProTip: they also like leveling up, scoring kills and getting loot.) But, in Riot's defense, they're far from the only game designers forcing customers to repeatedly click-through pointless pre-flight checklists.

I've also been playing the squad management dungeon-crawler Iratus recently.

 

"Choose a battle squad" hmmm, let's see, well, tough choice, jinkies gang, I'm stumped! Maybe I should go with Squad 1, the same one I've been playing so far and the ONLY squad I will ever choose because in the absence of multi-squad fights you only ever shuffle units in and out of your ONE active squad. Your reserves should mostly be healing/training. Somehow, being forced to confirm the obvious for hundreds of fights in a row has never once altered my choice!

The same routine proved doubly unjustifiable among Wartile's many nuisances:

 

- for often making it literally impossible to alter your group composition (three recruitable party members and exactly three spots on the boat, etc.) yet still demanding you drag-drop the idiotic little digitized plastic toys onto the little diorama boat every. single. goddamn. time!

 

But I'm not bitter, dear game developers. I understand that in the five or fifty gigabytes of memory space your piece of shit of a product's taking up on my hard drive, complete with glossy high-resolution flashing buttons for your Twitter feed, Discord channel, forums, store pages, blooper reels, YouTube ads, holiday-themed costumes, DLC spam, director's commentary and podcast of your mother-in-law's appendectomy, there just weren't enough bits left over to dedicate to a few hundred lines of plain text preserving my own preferences in a .ini file or whatever they're calling it these days. I simply cannot express my gratitude at your open disdain for my choices. Especially when you're asking my money for the privilege of choosing.

Like all so-called "MMO"s Lord of the Rings Online gradually degraded to an outlet store for imaginary funny hats over the years, and having played on and off since its launch I've accumulated quite a few such hats. And spaulders. And boots made for walking. And capes for the crusadin'. And more cowbell. And a loaf of bread for some reason. Well, collect however many you want, but you still only get 8 outfit slots maximum to play dress-up. Any more might stress our servers and cause lag or something, and we need that server space to store three different versions of every consumable item reiterated every five character levels and ten different names and stats for every reused item visual and aaahh, by the way, please keep buying more character slots to feed your alt-itis everyone and please never look up the term "force multiplier" if you hear the fiberoptics creakin'.

I mean, The Secret World was even worse, as there the limited number of outfit slots applied not just to cosmetics but the the various gear you constantly needed to un/re-slot when swapping classes and damage types for different dungeons. The same applies to the aforementioned League of Legends' "rune" loadouts.

What are you selling?

 

Games, as media, bank on interactivity. Everything from new map settings to character and town names to group and gear loadouts to cosmetics express your customers' interests, personality and strategy. I don't care if you're motivated by microtransactions or interface timesinks to drag out those gameplay-hour totals or you're trying to build addictive anticipation of reward stimuli. This bullshit's been old for ages now. I'm not inclined to believe that the same program which records my last million mouse clicks suddenly hits a patch of senility when trying to remember my name, or whether I clicked "1" or "2" in the squad selection window last fight. I even less appreciate being nickel-and-dimed for the honor of permutating the content I already paid you for.

If you have enough memory to animate your company logo, you have enough memory to save my preferences.

Cutting through the Treacle - Workin' That Photoshop

"Yeah, my momma she told me don't worry about your size"

Meghan Trainor - All about That Bass

 

 

I suppose my Marching Morons post can wait, as I've just installed, played and uninstalled the demo for WH40K: Battlesector, another title pointlessly trying to popularize turn-based multiplayer. While in principle I applaud the return to demos for finished products instead of publishing games in "beta" vaporware stage, in this case it made me unlikely to buy. On one hand, you could probably spot something fishy about Battlesector from one of their promo videos promising "fierce fast-paced combat" ... illustrated in a montage of freeze-frames! On the other hand, tell me what fundamental strategic interface tool is missing here:

Look carefully.

Especially in the corners... come on... it's right in front of you... or rather isn't.

Give up?

Maybe a glance at a truer multiplayer strategy game will refresh your memory.

That's Demigod, the most promising incarnation of the AoS game concept (or as the kiddies call it "MOBA") which unfortunately committed suicide via a mix of months-unaddressed unnecessary micromanagement, balance and lag issues. Demigod really was "fierce fast-paced (real-time) combat" complete with strategic elements like upgradeable team resources, gear management and resource node control. And lookie there, in the upper-left corner: a minimap! In fact Demigod gave you two ways to take in the battlefield situation at a glance, either minimap or zooming out as I did here until the field itself is situated atop a greater fantastic structure, whereas the previous screenshot was... also zoomed out as far as I could.

One thing I've always found funny about All About That Bass' music video: while superficially trumpeting their victory over fake beauty standards, Trainor and her backup dancers are still wearing about a kilo of make-up between them! Similarly, while Battlesector superficially might make good on WH40K's promise of tactical squad management by opting for more cerebral turn-based mechanics instead of real-time button-mashing, at the same time it really wants to keep you from thinking too hard. This is likely due to two conflicts of interest.

First off, turn-based multiplayer has yet to really overcome the tedium of waiting for your opponent to move, so Battlesector does whatever it can to keep your attention locked on how cool something looks while it's happening and not on how little's happening second by second. But just as the compass and map should've been integral to No Man's Sky from the start, some kind of strategic view is integral to a squad management game.

 

Second, Warhammer's camp-goth aesthetics are inescapably geared toward hyperexcitable tweens, and Battlesector is obviously all about the feels of thumping one's chest at playing a blood angel for the glory of Bloody the angel of blood.

Most aggravatingly, this does not look like a bad game. The couple of missions included in the demo show solid tactical basics, with resistances, choke points, melee engagement, range optimization, etc., which makes all the more perplexing Battlesector's conspicuous effort into masking its perceived weaknesses instead of playing its strengths. It's obviously designed for multiplayer given its small maps and low number of units. Fine. But instead of owning that shit, it also worries it won't be exciting enough. It jams your face into the game mat to prevent you from gaining any perspective on its totality of pieces and board size.

The conflict plays out in other ways as well. Battlesector allows you to order multiple units instead of completely locking your camera during animations (Sanctus Reach, ugh!) which should help during multiplayer, but still tries to sneak more subtle interface timesinks past your notice, like not being able to end a turn during animations, or convoluted numerous extra bonus gratis superfluous shot-by-shot firing animations, or slow, ponderous unit motion with built-in pauses at beginning and end, or a bullet-time camera during attacks, not to mention the overextended (albeit, for once, bearably voice-acted) cutscenes.

Battlesector could've done a better job than Gladius at adapting WH40K squad tactics for online play, if it weren't also all about its starry-eyed customer base, hedging its bets on feels instead of marketing stategic functionality. Financially I'm guessing it'll do fine in the short term on the backs of fanboys buying yet another Warhammer title to reaffirm their devotion to the brand, but like its predecessors I doubt it'll be worth buying until it drops to half-price or less. Basically another case of what can you give me that Planetfall doesn't? 

 

For single-player, that game can already give me more status effects, more units, more maps, more guns, more terrain features, More AoE and DoT and RoF, more turn-based tactics in general than even the most generous estimate of Battlesector's potential, and with the same grimdarky space wizard cheese for aesthetics to boot! If you've got all the right junk in all the right places, flaunt it! And, in addition, it allows you to fast-forward all unit moves.

 

As counterpoint to Planetfall (fundamentally a squad tactical) or Demigod (which while it tragically failed for some very valid mismanagement, no-one could accuse of missing its own point) tell me what Battlesector's core selling point is? If "fierce fast-paced (multiplayer) combat" was going to be your edge over Planetfall, then as soon as I fired up the first mission I should've been slapped in the face with an interface designed to allow me to out-think, out-maneuver and out-score my opponents at a glance, not have my nose rubbed in blood marine bleedin' angel blood bloody bloodiness. Or, if you wanted to build an immersive Blood Angel experience, screw the multiplayer, screw the fast pace and build on whatever their particular brand of balls-to-the-wall pyrrhic victory might be in the original WH40K fiction with varied units and abilities and persistent antiheroic characters.

*Sigh*

I'll catch you in the bargain bin a year from now, Battlesector.

More importantly though, think of how many games fail precisely because instead of capitalizing on their strengths, they undermine those strengths and waste time, resources and niche appeal hedging more bets than they can cover, slathering whore make-up over otherwise attractive features. It took twenty years and five installments for Age of Wonders to at long last make good on such an attempt, and that is a very rare example.

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.

Cutting through the Treacle: From Intriguing to Filth

"And it keeps re-pea-ting!
Will you please com-plete me!
Never be enough

To fill me up 
Never be enough

To fill me up
Never be enough

To fill me up 
Never be enough

To fill me up 
Never be enough

To fill me up 
Never be enough

To fill me up 
Never be enough

To fill me up 
Never be enough

To fill me up"

Nine Inch Nails - Please

As this blog's history can attest I've got a bee in my bonnet * about the topic of music in computer games, so my recent playthrough of The Age of Decadence brought to mind an old quibble. Game designers, listen up: you need more than one music track. Ok, that's not fair. Literally speaking, AoD does have decent variety of music (apt to its setting but a bit bland) for its low-budget indie title status. Unfortunately, its insistence on monstrously difficult combat encounters (and therefore large numbers of re-re-re-re-re-loads reloaded) ensures you'll be gritting your teeth through the same single combat music track for hours on end. And it's not like tiny, obscure indie games are the only ones prey to such inadvertent repetition. Fifteen years ago I was annoyed at exactly the same problem in Morrowind, sainted Morrowind of all things, probably because you spent most of your days as Nerevarine getting chased up and down the length and breadth of Vvardenfell island by a Hitchcock's worth of hyperaggressive, glitchy, omnipresent, omniscient, omnivorous cliff racers.

Neither is the problem restricted to sound. Here's a daily faction grinding quest in The Lord of the Rings Online.

Wait.
First off, "intriguing filth" is not a phrase I can easily associate with Middle-Earth. "Intriguing filth" is rather the stuff that shows up in my third e-mail account's inbox. You know the one I'm talking about.... the one I don't tell anyone I have. ** It mostly concerns boxes for "in".

More to the point, whoever cookie-cuttered those ridiculous little identical scores upon scores of "kill ten rats" quests really should've taken a second look at the template. While reiterating instructions might help for more complex/obscure/immersive tasks, there was absolutely no point to:
Task: <ITEMNAME>
Collect: <ITEMNAME>
Confirmation: <ITEMNAME>
Background: <BOILERPLATE> <ITEMNAME> <BOILERPLATE>
Reward: <CARROTNAME>

Clutter = "content" amirite game designers?

Of course anyone who's played an MMO is entirely too familiar with the most common form such repetitive reiterative regurgitated reformulated retread redundancy can take: reskinned monsters. In many cases alleviating the problem (e.g. modeling and testing new mobs) would take a hefty amount of work hours, the cost of which would interfere with studios ripping off their customers.

Also, it bears mentioning that repeating patterns are a perfectly valid creative tool which can maintain thematic coherence in otherwise disparate elements by reiterating a particular motif, or can deliberately convey obsessiveness, drudgery or monotony or can build upon a theme gradually by leaving its core element unchanged or can highlight novel elements by eliding familiar ones. Combat music is a good idea. It conveys urgency, excitement... and perhaps more importantly, in some cases, the very fact that you're in combat. Re-skinning monsters can actually help immersion by conveying an evolutionary gradation to an imaginary world's wildlife. A consistent interface helps users find necessary information quickly.

But still... sometimes you really have to marvel at the sheer laziness. How hard could it possibly be to trim down a half-page "quest" template into a two-line "task" template? How much coding could it possibly require to prevent a music track from looping more than, say, thirteen times in a row or within a single hour? While you're re-skinning monsters, would it kill you to also alter their interactions slightly to keep them from being just different-colored C.R.A.P.? Would that really have broken Blizzard Entertainment's bank?



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* note to self: purchase spacious bonnet and singular bee

** Oops.

Cutting Through the Treacle: Super- { }

"I'm the Arch Dandy no-goodnik and I'm headed for Crashville"
Marilyn Manson - The Bright Young Things


Now, as I've of late laid waste off and on (and often below) the third Age of dubious Wonders, its weirdly uneven creative side has begun to grate a bit.

I ran across an Arch Angel. So what, I hear you retort, those overgrown pigeons are a dime a dozen in these sorts of games. Can't swing a dead manticore without hitting a whole murder of cherubs. Nonetheless it did take me by surprise as to that point I had never encountered anything simply named <Angel> in AoW3 ... and I have yet to do so. In fact, it mostly avoids Abrahamic mythology. So I'd love a chance to ask that haberdasher's whore in that picture what exactly he's an "arch" of ; if you're a ruling angel where are all your ruled angels? I'd even settle for college ruled angles, and that's allotting you a pretty wide margin.

In fact, judging by various other notes in their books, whoever scribbled and dribbled the flavor text for this fantasy wonderland ever-so-slightly abused appending "arch" to random things. The conquerable undead dwelling, the Necropolis, is stuffed with several kinds of undead "archon" units (supposedly for narrative purposes from the campaign... but still.) My first character was an Arch Druid, which sounded like, oh emm gee, totes awesomesauce until I consistently failed to discover any regular old Druid Druids. By this point I'm wondering why they didn't just go whole arch-hog and name every class and creature an arch-sorcerer, arch-necromancer, arch-warlord, arch-pikemen, arch-knights, arch-etcetera.

Games are highly prone to such... let's call them "orphaned superlatives" in their constant bid for coolness in the eyes of teenagers. To some extent it can be harmless flamboyance. We expect that our heroes will have Big Guns and Big Spaceships with EVEN BIGGER GUNS!!! But you have to draw the line at gimmicks meant to look impressive specifically by comparison to a mundane alternative - yet which lack that point of contrast! It's especially hypocritical in Age of Wonders' case, as its dev team retained the wherewithal to poke fun at DnD-inspired RPGs' fetish for appending "dire" to any wild animal to make it seem more threatening, by implementing the Dire Penguin. Henceforth known as the Arch Penguin Archon.

Neither is this only a linguistic issue. Trebuchets have become the most gratuitously overused piece of large medieval equipment by a considerable margin, both in Hollywood movies and video games. They look mechanically complex, with more moving parts than most fabrications of the castle age, and their verticality registers as more imperious to our tree-climbing primate instincts, thus making for a more impressive visual. But just chucking them into a medieval-ish setting out of context, while ignoring the fact that such devices were basically "arch-catapults" or the mere tail end of an eclectic lot of projectile throwing devices, saps them of their rightful victory over their peers. If you want some rock lobbers in your game, start with the basics, then add a special case superlative in the form of a trebuchet or a cannon.

Straining so hard to impress that you lose track of context and contrast is a great way to (paradoxically) end up looking and sounding flat and mundane. And hey, I'll be the first to admit my RPG characters and parties tend to follow a fairly strict "no filthy hu-mons" rule, but that routine's so exquisitely satisfying precisely in contrast to the filthy humon NPCs around me. Super-man is a lot less impressive if you fail to establish the baseline of "man" and many a game has made a name for itself by reining in its rising action to properly contextualize heroic apotheosis.

The alternative can be best summarized by the endless proliferation and meaningless escalation of magic items in RPGs, especially in WoW-clone MMOs and their loot grinding treadmill. When "rare" blue items describe your lowest, basest, most uselessly common gear tier, I think your brainwork's sheared a few cogs. To reiterate that ethically muddled yet still apt line from The Incredibles, "when everyone's super, no-one will be."


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edit 2019/09/23
I should mention that AoW3 is indeed "uneven" and not a bad game, and handled other examples much better. Navies for instance consist of tier 2 frigates and tier 3 galleons, with only the Dreadnought leader class having access to the tier 4... ironclad (a.k.a. Arch-Frigate) as part of their steampunk motif. How can the same game manage to present both the best and worst ways to handle an issue?

Cutting Through the Treacle: I Want a Little List

There's something I want every company who advertises online to try, and I'm concerned especially, as is my wont, with computer game designers. From now on, I want you to carry out all of your intra- and inter-organizational communication via Tumblr-style tiles, or animated banner ads, or youtube videos with hammy narration and bombastic Hollywood movie preview soundtracks. All of it. No more helpful flowcharts, no more concise and clearly explicative memoranda, no more easy-on-the-eyes bulleted lists with neatly nested annotations, no more calendars delineating who works when and on what task. I want you to try getting all your information via flashy, endless Tumblr jumbles. Since you seem to think it an appropriate means of conveying information about your product, since you think it's good enough for your customers, then it must also be good enough for your workspace.

But if it's not good enough for you to be treated like an idiot, inundated with flash instead of substance, glitz instead of information, then describe your product!

List your system requirements.
List the genres your product might fit.
List gameplay options.
List your factions.
List your classes.
List your weapons.
List your map sizes and terrain types.
List your monster types.
List your skill trees.

List everything! In plain text! You are not transcendent artistes birthing wonders beyond mortal speech. You're a bunch of semiliterate code-monkeys, technicians with maybe one or two decent ideas in your heads worth paying for. Express those ideas clearly and succinctly, without the industrial light and magic. In order to get information about your product, I should not have to glean every single scrap of useful info out of half an hour's video of some degenerate nasal-voiced dweeb slobbering all over the microphone and fumbling at building hype. Provide clear information. Document your product's features just like you're supposed to document your code.*

Note, I'm not (just) complaining about the existence of advertising. I'm pissed off that for over a decade now it's been impossible to find any official information, about any product but especially games, outside of advertisements. Where are the fact sheets? In the days when games still came in cardboard boxes, companies grudgingly compiled lists of features if for no other reason than to have something that could fit on a game box. Unlimited broadband has transmuted quick-reference cards into tedious animated, narrated, triple-pixelated fudge ripples for only $9.99 for a limited time in the cash shop 'til you drop loot don't scoot before you get the boot and what was I talking about again? Oh yeah: obfuscation.

Just tell me what you're selling, and do away with that profligate poseur and cheat, the youtube narcissist. He never will be missed. They'll none of them be missed.


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*Though, from some of the complaints I've been hearing about recent games, documenting code has gone out of style as well.

Cutting Through the Treacle - TwitFaceTwitchTube

"Feeling your sting down inside me
I'm not dying for it"

Godsmack - I Stand Alone


Back when I used to get more involved in online games and the player guilds thereof, I would occasionally grow annoyed at the repetitiveness and inanity which flooded my guild chat window. Most of that chatter consisted of greetings, which seem quite pointless given that your grand entrances and exits are already automatically announced to any guild member who cares to keep the "log-in notifications" UI option flagged. So I'd liven things up by magnanimously providing smart-ass rejoinders to any hello or good-bye which rubbed me the wrong way. Among my favorites, I'd taunt anyone who said "hello, people" or "good night, people" with:
"We're not people. We're just random collections of pixels on your screen."
- and as far as you get to demand of a fellow player, that's all I am. Wintermute. Basta. We shoot lazorz at goblins together. We're not automatically friends. Friendship should never be required for basic goblin-laser interactions.

To my great shame, after over a decade of pointedly avoiding any of their products, I've recently started playing Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm MOBA to fill my quota of blowing tween brats' idiot heads off with rockets. Though I've grown accustomed to all sorts of false advertising, cash grabs, market manipulation, datamining, microtransactions and other charlatanry and robbery by the game industry, I'll admit old Bliz upped the ante with this loading screen "hint":
"Playing with friends grants you a 50% bonus to experience granted after playing a match."

OK, sure, there might be some practical reason for this. Maybe it shortens the team-making algorithm's search a bit. As likely as not, it's also touted as promoting "community spirit" or some other codependent tripe. Really, the rip-off artists at Blizzard are just well aware how many customers remain in their uncreative multiplayer extravaganzas merely to maintain their existing online connections. And they're not shy about exploiting your emotional weaknesses.
Pushing it to the extent of punishing me for queuing solo undermines such games' strongest selling point. Automated matchmaking exists precisely so as to save me the anguish of associating with any of you shiteating degenerate subsentient vermin for more than one match at a time. You are pixels on my screen, no more. Moreover, players should never be rewarded for trying to stack the deck in their own favor by stacking teams in random matchups. An alliance of convenience is already convenient. That deal doesn't need to be sweetened.

But it's a sign of our hypersocial times.

I also recently grabbed War for the Overworld, a by-the-numbers copycat of Dungeon Keeper of dungeon keeping fame. I decided to hold off on playing it after my first attempt, when it ground to a halt on the very first tutorial mission.

Now, either that's a memory leak the size of Niagara Falls* or these assholes really think their piddlin' little 20x20 tile 2D playground for a dozen units is supposed to take up over three Skyrims' worth of RAM. Looks like someone didn't bother paying for bug testing. On the other hand they did bother wasting development time on integrating every possible form of interwebz hot air.
I didn't pay you $15 for a link to TwitFaceTwitchTube. Nor do I want to sign up for your spamletter. As for spotlighting your niece's custom map for me to download and uninstall in disgust five minutes later, I'll pass. "Chat with the devs" - ? To accomplish what? Have your representative at the Indian call center tell me your buggy p.o.s. of a product's "working as intended?" Or try to sell me three dozen DLC packs?

Players can and will socialize in games, and providing the basic tools for them to do so aids even single-player games via discussion forums. However, as the decades drag on, more and more developers have been using social media tie-ins as a crutch, as a distraction to keep customers busy chatting to each other instead of rationally evaluating the product's performance. In contrast, here's the main screen for FrostPunk, a beautiful piece of game designerin':

Look, ma, no twits!

A good cook doesn't need to mask the food's flavor with too much salt, grease or capsaicin. A good architect doesn't need to over-decorate a building's facade to distract from its structure. A good game gives you the game, to stand on its own, not to be engaged in as some form of simian social posturing, as the popular thing all your "friends" are into - but as a solid work capable of withstanding cold-blooded, independent scrutiny. Even in a multiplayer game, I'm here for the game. Other participants are merely a necessary evil.

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* That this program's acronym very nearly spells out WTF OMG was merely a hilarious bonus.