All posts in category Musings

Keynoted, Captain

Kent and I are going to PAX East. Last year, I attended without really knowing what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised by the experience—PAX is a very well-run con. This year, we’re going again, and so that I can enjoy the experience, I’m deliberately ignoring everything asinine that the PA guys have done over the past six months. This isn’t the first time that the jolly old internet has pardoned its own for offensive ignorance, and it won’t be the last.

What I’m most interested in, right now, is the choice of keynote speaker. Last year’s was Wil Wheaton, and although I didn’t see him give his speech live (Kent and I were busy camping out in line for a panel), I did see it later that week, thanks to a Youtube video. Please, if you haven’t seen his speech, watch it.

That speech has always made me a little sick.

Actually, scratch that. It makes me want to vomit all over my shoes. It’s unintentionally ironic and communicates an awful message to game enthusiasts and game developers all over the planet.

Wheaton is a great speaker. It bothers me deeply, however, when he uses his speech-making magic to summon up the utopian illusion of the unified gamer community and parade it around like it’s a real thing—or even a thing that most game-playing individuals experience. “We gamers”? “Our culture”? Bah! I remember sitting in the hallway right outside the door to the theater where Wheaton was giving his speech, hearing the audience’s muffled roars of approval, and thinking, “Hell, that’s an awful lot of eighteen-to-thirty-year-old males in there.” “Gamer” isn’t a problematic word for Wheaton, but it is for plenty of other people. ‘Gamers’ are not a unified tribe. The gaming community is not welcoming. It certainly isn’t polite to outsiders, but hell, it’s not welcoming to insiders, either, if those insiders are women, homosexuals, minorities, the elderly, or the disabled. Some of us feel this particularly sharply.

When Wheaton gives a speech suggesting that I should consider a room mostly full of men—a room in which I stick out like a sore thumb—“home,” it makes me wanna puke. Just sayin’. I admire the guy, but I think that speech is bullshit. Just take a look at the crowd-shots from last year’s PAX East photo galleries: fairly light on the ladies, right? Most of PAX East looked like Wil Wheaton. Which is to say: white, male, and a little smug.

This year, though, the PAX organizers are bringing in Jane McGonigal to give the keynote. It’s an exciting risk for them, and it’s the reason why I think that it’s better to attend PAX than sit at home and mope about the way they chose to behave this fall.

McGonigal is a polarizing figure to begin with: her language is generally studded with hyperbole, and the kinds of observations she makes—particularly, the ones in her notorious TED speech—are not always useful observations.  I find her a bit insufferable, but I appreciate that she’s out there, publishing books and producing games.

For a variety of other reasons, McGonigal won’t necessarily be a smooth pill for the PAX crowd to swallow. Although McGonigal is reeel ladygamerz, she doesn’t fit easily into the gamer stereotype promulgated by Wheaton, Tycho, Gabe, and their ilk. She doesn’t design games for a ‘gamer’ audience. Mostly, she does ARGs, and her ARGs are often deliberately aimed at the kind of people who would never call themselves gamers. Though she does use the kind of language gamers are supposed to understand—the phrase “epic win” is central to her TED talk—she doesn’t prop up the gaming status-quo in the way that Penny Arcade does.

Some people hate Jane McGonigal so much that they can’t keep away from the gender-specific insults—which bothers me a lot. Given the tone of the non-professional crowd I saw at PAX East last year, and given the kind of over-the-top thing McGonigal tends to say, I’m sure that there will be at least some negative feedback when she speaks this year.

But I’m glad that the PA people are risking it. Although Wheaton’s speech was rousing, it wasn’t challenging. Nobody in that audience went away unsure of themselves or excited about the ways in which this medium and its audiences are changing. Essentially, he got up on that stage and announced, to gamers and game developers alike, “Okay, guys, you’re doing a god job. Keep on keepin’ on.”

From some perspectives, that’s a pretty awful message.

9 Comments
by lauramichet on March 7, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Events, Musings
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Posted by lauramichet on March 7, 2011

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2011/03/07/keynoted-captain/

Translations

For the past week, I’ve been playing through the original Starcraft’s single-player campaign. For the first time.

I’d attempted it five or six years ago, but I was embarrassingly awful at it and therefore hated it. I’d grown up playing many, many RTSes, mostly set in human history. My favorites were the Age of Empires games. They are slightly more forgiving to those who, like me, are awful at ‘micro,’ and while I was never very good at any of them, I could still enjoy them and not feel like a complete idiot. Starcraft made me feel like an idiot.

Nevertheless, I might have stuck with Starcraft if its single-player campaign hadn’t struck me as such an awful piece of crap. I didn’t enjoy the talking heads. History buff that I was, I didn’t ‘get’ the heavy references to the southern United States (and I still don’t). The characters were only very fleetingly sketched, and people kept dipping in and out of view, changing sides, and saying asinine things in funny accents. I never even got to the bit where a certain someone transforms into a certain Queen of Somethings. It’s not like I expected overmuch from the game—I knew that RTSes can occasionally suck at telling stories. Starcraft, though, struck me as extraordinarily bad.

But I’ve been slowly plowing through it these past few weeks, and I’ve been enjoying it. I’ve also been watching many, many Starcraft II replay videos. Together, I think they’re helping me understand something about the role that story sometimes plays in multiplayer-enabled RTSes. Both campaigns and replay commentaries serve, in part, the exact same purpose. They’re translations.

Starcraft II replay videos with commentary are fun because they transform chaotic madness into coherent stories. Alone, I can’t access the ‘conversation’ that takes place between these high-level players as they compete. That conversation takes place in a long-running strategic context of strategies and counter-strategies stretching back over years and years, and it’s a context that I don’t yet possess. Whatever’s going on, it’s not necessarily going to fall easily into an attractive narrative, or even the kind of narrative that I can understand. But humans like to see things in terms of gripping stories, so people like HD and Husky step in and, voila, the story congeals. They turn a frantic conversation in a language I don’t speak into something I can understand and appreciate; they imbue the players with a kind of character that isn’t immediately discernable to the untrained eye; with the tones of their voice, they give structure and energy to a match. They are translators. Sports commentators have always been translators.

Secretly, a translator

Additionally, sports commentators have always been authors. They’re not necessarily telling the story of a match in the same way that the players themselves would have told it. Instead, and of necessity, they’re writing a whole new one. Translation is never perfect, but we need translations, and we need stories. Humans love to see the things we don’t fully understand as coherent stories. They help us to understand those things, even if they’re not the kinds of things that can honestly be represented by a conventional story.

One example of this is historical periodization—the division of history into consecutive and self-contained segments of time, like “The Middle Ages” or “The Industrial Age.” We do it because it helps us to understand the past, not because the past actually took place in discrete chunks. We take a bunch of stuff that happened around the same dates, point out common characteristics, give that period a name, and slap it into a timeline and—voila!— the story of human existence congeals! On one level, periodization is important, because we can’t talk about things or ideas without thinking of them as things. On another level, a philosophical one, it’s not entirely ‘realistic.’ For example, historians have recently begun to freak out about whether or not the Renaissance ever actually ‘existed.’ We may have arbitrarily imposed our conception of it as a coherent time-block because time-blocks suit us. Rendering any kind of chaos into story always involves a little bit of arbitrary re-authoring.

The Renaissance: didn't "really" "happen"

On some levels, putting a story to an RTS is like this, whether it’s the story provided by commentary or by a single-player campaign. The story re-writes the experience into something a bit more palatable and accessible, reinventing it as something that we can learn from. It’s impossible to learn from chaos, and at the first glance of an untrained eye, many RTSes are chaos. But single-player campaigns and replay commentaries each provide the translations for single-player and multiplayer play, respectively.

It should be obvious to anyone who has ever played an RTS that single-player campaigns frequently exist to teach players the basics that they’ll need in order to function in multiplayer competition. By imposing careful restrictions, a mission can isolate certain skills and strategies, teaching you something that you might never have noticed in normal multiplayer play. Soon enough, you can talk the game’s talk—and, if you’re good, manipulate its mechanics as creatively as you could manipulate any language.

Similarly, the best replay commentary points out and isolates certain concepts and strategies in a way that allows players to decode the language of high-level play ’syllable’ by ‘syllable’, so to speak, teaching strategies that the single-player campaign cannot teach. While replay delivers this instruction in a simple, upfront context (“you want the translation, so I am giving it to you”), the way teachers provide translations of difficult concepts to students through traditional schooling, an RTS’s single-player translation takes the form of a straight-up fiction.

But each method uses stories, as I mentioned above. The story of a good match—say, the first clash between IdrA and Masq, and the eventual rematch—is as exciting as many of the stories Blizzard comes up with. Personally, I think they’re often a lot more exciting, mostly because the human drama is real.

At any rate, I find it interesting that RTS developers haven’t yet broadly acknowledged the similarities between these two teaching tools. They don’t provide competitive multiplayer campaigns that teach the same things that commentary does in the way that single-player campaigns teach it—with stories. Granted, for a game as complex as Starcraft, that would be incredibly difficult. You’d have to do an extended beta to test your multiplayer design, then develop a campaign around what you’d discovered, and perhaps find a whole new way to tie a translating narrative onto the top of all that. Worst of all, as the game entered its extended lifespan, strategies might emerge that you hadn’t predicted or worked into the campaign. They might even break the campaign. You might have to edit some of the creative content along with the natural act of balancing the game. You could definitely do it, though, and it could be much easier to do for a game with simpler mechanics. I’d love to see a game take some lessons from replay commentary and include a competitive multiplayer campaign with a story that reacts as the players defeat one another.

Then again, a good RTS should make it fun to learn to play competitively by simply playing competitively. That’s how I played Age of Empires II and Age of Mythology as a kid, and even though I sucked, I enjoyed it. People who currently battle for their rankings in Starcraft II ladders are having fun without a story in a competitive campaign. Nevertheless, they’re probably watching commentaries. They still want translations, and they use them often. Honestly, as a kid, I could have done with some good translations. If I’d had a few more than I did, I’d probably suck a lot less than I do now.

—–

Also: Where have Kent and I been? Well, we’ve been having the END OF THE SUMMER, and it’s busy, and will continue to be. In the coming week I’ll be moving across the country—leaving the lawless, mazelike ruin that is Los Angeles and returning to the east coast, where people are NORMAL, goddamn it. Kent is also making mighty movements across  our planet. On top of this, Kent and I have been working on a variety of separate simultaneous projects that also eat up a lot of time and energy. I, for one, have just had my thesis approved and am reading loads and loads of books and doing other kinds of quote-unquote research. But we hope to be back to our old something-on-the-site-at-least-more-than-once-a-week schedule in the “near” “future”. Interpret those scare-quotes as you see fit.

13 Comments
by lauramichet on August 27, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in AAA Games, Musings, PC, Uncategorized
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Posted by lauramichet on August 27, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/08/27/translations/

Blame it on the sunshine

I’m excited about the future.

I mean, people who play a lot of games are usually excited about the future because, on one level, games are about the future, about the acceleration of technology and the impossible Peter-Molyneux-promises we all want to come true right now. Gamers are notoriously nostalgic, but, let’s face it: we’re really bad at holding onto that past. Systems come and go; consoles break; we don’t always have backwards-compatibility; we play so many new games that we lose the time and interest to play old ones. Gamers love the past so much simply because it’s something we can’t exactly touch anymore. We pine away. Whatever old games are, whatever part of our lives they may represent—childhood, happier times, old opportunities and regrets—they’re things we can’t see, have, change, or re-live. Nostalgia is always a kind of sadness, even if it’s only a faint kind.

But, honestly, who wants to be six anymore? The games I played were often dark and grey and kind of blurry when I was six, and things get darker the longer they live in my memory. Today, though, it’s sunny outside. I’m going to go into town and write a thing and maybe read a book, and tonight I’m going to stare at the BioShock: Infinite screens again. I’ve played an awful lot of grey-ass games, particularly recently– games grey in more ways than one. When I think about today’s games twenty years from now, I’m going to be remembering an awful lot of cement. I’m going to be nostalgic about it all, too, and I kind of dread that. It’ll all come down like a second layer of dark. See, it’s already got to the point where I will lose a lot of excitement for a title if the screens don’t turn up with enough green in them. Green and blue together, preferably. Maybe green and blue and white.

On a scale of 0 to rad, the future is pretty rad.

16 Comments
by lauramichet on August 13, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by lauramichet on August 13, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/08/13/blame-it-on-the-sunshine/

An alternative interpretation

For reasons associated with an internship I just began working on in LA, I was at E3 on Wednesday.

It was terrifying.

E3 is the Great Babylon of the games industry. E3 is a birthday designed by plutocrat after his kid couldn’t get a reservation at LaserQuest. E3 is a digital fleshmarket. E3 is what happens when the high gods of video games descend to earth and make terrifying ESRB-slaying love to the scaly-assed demons of corporate sin.

Okay, it was a ton of fun. But it was also insidiously evil and ultimately pretty horrifying.

I grew up in New England, where we have a reputation for stoicism, grim jaws, and frugality. I didn’t necessarily grow up in a frugal household, but my family are not the kind of people who wheel money around in a wheelbarrow in our back yard. We do not make daisy chains out of twenty-dollar bills and string them around our living room like holiday garlands. I’m naturally a bit wary of extreme expressions of wealth; I’ve always believed that people who make a lot of money would be better off using it to buy expensive PCs than platinum motorcycles. So to speak.

But the people who make E3 happen probably have suits made out of money. Stitched together with the hair of the poor. Yeah. They probably name their dogs “Benjamin” (or “Benjamins,” to emphasize the quantity they possess). E3 is an enormous lavish media-whoring dollars-spectacle of doom, and it is a bit chilling.

First of all: the media are the kings and queens of E3. It’s a publicity event, and they’re the real guests, not the industry people. I’m not saying that I saw Gabe Newell give five hundred dollars in cold hard cash to every media person he saw, or that Cliffy B gave the staff of Game Informer foot-baths with his hair, Mary Magdalene-style, or that Peter Molyneux personally kissed every baby of every reporter present at the entire conference—but the people (and they were mostly media people) at the Microsoft keynote DID all get free Xbox Slims. So. Make of that what you will.

Bethseda’s booth had a fifteen-foot-tall plastic T-Rex in it, and it was entirely walled off. You could only get in if you were from the media and had made an appointment. For the entirety of the show, Square Enix’s booth had an enormous screen playing footage from its upcoming games. The videos were synchronized with all of the lights on the booth, such that they would change color and flash in time with the footage. When you take into account how large their booth was, well—I’m guessing that this particular booth cost as much to run per hour as, say, a minor-to-middling Broadway production.

I bet if you tally up all the money spent at making E3 be E3 and divide it by the number of reporters present, you’re looking at many thousands of dollars per reporter spent. Like, maybe over ten thousand. Maybe a lot over ten thousand. And that’s the real focus, of course—spending money to make the media happy. E3 happens for the people at home, but so that the reporters to convey that experience to consumers in the best light, publishers and developers wine and dine the fuck out of them, so to speak. But here it’s more like “demo and dine the fuck out of them,” or “demo and free system the fuck out of them.”

So, yeah. I’m never really going to enjoy any E3 coverage ever again, guys. If I had been sent there by a media outlet, I would feel pretty fucking unclean now. Luckily, I wasn’t.

But still. It was like watching two strangers have sex in a tub filled with golden coins.

17 Comments
by lauramichet on June 19, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by lauramichet on June 19, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/06/19/an-alternative-interpretation/

Or maybe all games are in the second person

Laura is done with her term, but I’ve got 20 pages to write between now and next Wednesday.  Also, I’ve had a horrible virus that has left me sleeping for 16 hours a day, running a high fever, and swallowing like my throat is made of sand and ouch.  I’m feeling a bit better today, but I’m not really working at the moment, so here is a quick post!

The more that I consider what exactly a second person shooter would be, the more I become convinced that our terminology is very odd.  The phrase “second person” refers to a particular narrative mode where the reader is pulled into the text by being treated as the subject of discussion, as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City: “It’s ten-fifty when you get to Times Square. You come up on Seventh Avenue blinking. The sunlight is excessive. You grope for your shades.”  In this sense, aren’t almost all games in the second person?  Even “third person shooters” have you controlling someone, making them, to some extent, “you.”

For games, we’ve retooled the term “first person” to refer to perspective distance, not narrative mode.  This makes sense, since we need a way to talk about our visual relationship with our on-screen body.  But what about games where text is the primary means of communication?  The terminology of perspective distance doesn’t make much sense here.  I can’t even imagine what a “third person” text adventure would be if we used the ludic sense of the phrase.

Text games are dueling narratives—one that the game is telling to you, and one that you are telling to the game.  Outputs and inputs.  “Ye find yeself in yon dungeon. Ye see a FLASK.” And “Get ye flask.”  The user input is usually directive, and the game’s output—the story—is usually in the second person.  A text adventure in the first or third person would actually be pretty cool.  Has anyone played one of these?

At any rate, as to the question “what is a second person shooter,” let me put forth my answer!

6) Almost any text adventure with guns.

You enter a room with seven Nazi Zombies.  Obvious exits are NORTH and EAST.

>Shoot zombies

Where would you like to shoot the zombies?

>In the head

Your pump action shotgun splatters fascist zombie brains all over the cave walls.  That’s what they get for following you into your secret lair!

—

By the way, to anyone who hasn’t played it, GO PLAY SWITCHBREAK’S GAME.  It is a second person shooter.

11 Comments
by Kent Sutherland on June 5, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Musings

Posted by Kent Sutherland on June 5, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/06/05/or-maybe-all-games-are-in-the-second-person/

Is Deus Ex 3 a movie or a game?

Because it looks like it would be one hell of an excellent movie. I haven’t seen a cinematic trailer this long, plotty, or robust in a while.

I mean, I’m totally aware that cinematic trailers can be like this. I didn’t expect gameplay footage or anything. But usually when we see these kinds of things, they’re only fifty seconds long. Just a short clip of characters pumping shotguns and saying “Let’s roll!” in Clint Eastwood voices, or giving the camera heavy-lidded angst-eyes while titles and release dates flash by, or talking about why they love Commander Shepherd, or things like that. Clearly prerendered, but framed in such a way that we know we’re talking about a game, here. Even the ME2 cinematic trailer was just a list of squad members presented flashily. The launch trailer was also a list of squadmates, and it even had some in-game sex-scene footage in it. It had the framing logic of an RPG. When we start talking lists of recruitables, we know we’re talking about that kind of game. The Deuz Ex 3 trailer doesn’t have any of that framing logic.

The other type of cinematic trailer we see is the type where everything is patently cutscene footage. But the Deus X trailer feels like it was taken from a larger story, from a whole movie’s worth of story, not from just a few cutscenes. It feels like I’m going to want to play this game in a huge empty room with a bucket of popcorn and an Icee on hand. Which is, of course, kinda tough, right?

Here’s the thing: I’m starting to think that part of the reason we’re so skeptical of game movies (and I haven’t yet seen Prince of Persia, so I could be totally wrong about this) is that it’s not wise to try and make players feel the same way about a game character the same way we feel about a movie character, and vice-versa. Obviously, different strategies are involved in the characterization and the world-building, and so on. The kind of player-character that appeals to people in a game is often flimsy enough to be inhabitable, while simultaneously characterized enough not to feel like a sock puppet. Action-movie heroes are also vehicles for self-insertion, but in a different way: we spend more time regarding them from the outside than from the inside, so they’re shinier on that side, so to speak.

From what I see of these characters in this trailer, they’re the kind of people I want to regard from the outside. Or—I mean—they’re the kind of characters I don’t yet feel like I can regard from the inside, they’ve been polished up so hard.*

What do you guys think? I mean, when it comes to trailers-what-make-me-feel-excited, I think this is right up there among the best. But it doesn’t feel much like a game trailer.

—

*Except for that giving-orders guy  near the end. His voice acting just screams VIDEO GAME

24 Comments
by lauramichet on June 4, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Musings, PC
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Posted by lauramichet on June 4, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/06/04/is-deus-ex-3-a-movie-or-a%c2%a0game/

POST-PAPERS EXHAUSTION POST!

All of my writings for school are done.  My brain hurts, and migranes have inflicted me with temporary blindness. I wrote 35 pages in two days and read over a thousand pages in one weekend to prepare myself for the process. Now I cannot focus my eyes more than five feet in front of my face, and I have a headache. Hooray!

So I wrote this frivolous thing. It is a list of all possible definitions of the ‘Second Person Shooter.’  See, most of the random web searches that get directed here are phrases like “definition second person shooter” or “example second person shooter.” People out there want to know what a second-person shooting-people video-game would look and feel like. And they think we know? Pah! We don’t.

Frankly, we’re curious, too. We picked the name “Second Person Shooter” basically because it sounded interesting. Our excuse: we were despairing. We’d just spent over an hour combining random nouns in the hope that something would click, but we’d only come up with monstrosities like “Antelope Rapture” and “Black Hole Church.” (I still think either of those would have been awesome. Perhaps we can sell them to nameless indie-rock bands.) At any rate, we are definitely not the experts on what a ‘second person shooter’ would look like. I myself don’t think that a second person shooter would be any fun to play, unless the idea was approached with a certain amount of drunken levity.

1)      A GAME WHERE YOU ARE EMBODIED, AND CONTROL A DIFFERENT GUY WHO SHOOTS A GUN

In this game, you have control over yourself, in a first-person perspective, and over another individual, the shooter. It would be a little bit like that one team-building exercise where blindfolded people team up with non-blindfolded people who shout instructions at them while they and navigate mazes or throw yarn balls at one another. Have you ever done that? I did it once at a summer camp staff training, and it was horrible.

Anyway, for this game, I’m thinking of things along the lines of the robot segments from TLC’s Logic Quest. Remember that one? You had to program a robot-like boxy-man painted up to look like a king or a knight. He was always inside this weird kind of spacious jail cell, and you would have to program him with a set of commands that would let him unlock the cell. Anyway, this variety of second person shooter would require your embodied digital self to either 1) program or 2) directly control a separate individual who has a gun. Objective: shoot dudes without getting you or your puppet-man shooter shot. It would be INCREDIBLY COMPLEX. There would be WAAAY TOO MANY CONTROLS. Basically, this setup would translate poorly to the kind of moment-by-moment excitement of a shooter— it would be awesome, but only for five minutes. After which point every player would either tear the game directly out of their hard-drives with the brute psycho-magnetic force of their unholy rage, or commit pathetic, despairing suicide in the drippy corner of their local basement. That’s what I did after a few sessions of Logic Quest. Yep.

2)      A GAME WHERE SOMEONE DESCRIBES YOU IN SECOND PERSON AS YOU SHOOT PEOPLE.

Such a game almost already exists. It’s Night of the Cephalopods: A Terrifying Experiment in Narrative Excess, a lovely bit of indie freeware from 2008. In it, you, the terrified Lovecraftian protagonist, run through a foggy forest while squidly-face monsters chase you. You shoot them. EVERY TIME YOU DO ANYTHING, the narrator describes it. There aren’t too many variations in the voiceovers, so you’ll quickly reach the extent of your amusement with this game—but for its length and complexity, it’s brilliant. It would BE  a second person shooter, except the descriptions are phrased in first-person rather than second.

3)      A GAME IN WHICH OTHER PEOPLE SHOOT YOU

I’m thinking of something in the style of The Onion’s ‘Close Range’, but instead the player is the guy who gets shot. And dies. Over and over. Or maybe the player never dies, and just stands there while he or she gets shot again and again for no reason. Not sure which would be more effective. Basically, though, that’s the bottom line: you watch as someone shoots you over and over and over and over again. Infinitely. Not much else to say about this idea. Maybe the environments would change? In one level, you’d stand there while people shot you in a jungle; then there’s be an ice level, and every time you’re shot your body would physics-slide all around the map, ragdolling against barriers? No idea. Not even sure where player action would fit into this game.

(Also: the staff members of the embarrassing college humor magazine I write for consider Close Range to be one of our favorite-ever videos. New recruits sometimes have a hard time understanding why we love it so much. But we do. It is sublime. And I love the Max Payne references.)

4)      A GAME IN WHICH YOU MUST SHOOT THE SECOND PERSON OUT OF EVERY PAIR

Pros: Would teach our children the important moral binaries they will need in order to navigate the modern, adult cultural world.

Cons: Would be very short. Also, very easy. Too easy.

5)      …GOD OF WAR?

While checking over this post, Kent suggested to me that the famous from-the-victim’s-perspective death scene in GoW III is a second-person death scene. A shooter version of that, he posits, would be a second-person shooter. So: like idea number 3, but instead of playing the silent victim, you’d shoot yourself. Gosh! So  crazy!

I would only play this game if there were a bit where time slowed down while the bullet flew towards your face, and you had to contemplate the philosophical profundity of your self-capping act.

21 Comments
by lauramichet on June 2, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Musings, Uncategorized
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Posted by lauramichet on June 2, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/06/02/post-papers-exhaustion-post/

Salutations, New Readers!

To all of our new readers: welcome! The past few weeks have been crazy.  We were linked on Rock Paper Shotgun, Critical Distance, Game Set Watch, and Gamasutra.  Laura and I both had pieces republished on Kotaku.  Our views per week have moved from the hundreds to the thousands.  And so, we wanted to take a moment to welcome all of you to the site and let you know what we’re about.

Laura and I are both Creative Writing majors at Dartmouth College.  We met in a course called Digital Game Studies, and after the course ended we both decided that we wanted to continue writing about games.  We’re interested in seeing games in new ways, in examining how we interact with games, and in exploring how games deal (or don’t deal) with important issues.  We think that games are more than just products, they’re experiences.

We try not to get too bogged down in academic stuff, but we don’t always succeed. We want our writing and ideas to be interesting, fresh and accessible.  Lots of games writing falls into the preview / review pattern, and this sucks because writers often stop talking about games just as soon as everyone else starts to play them.  We try to write the sort of stuff that will still be interesting in a few years, and we try to engage with old titles as well as new ones.

Several loyal readers grace these pages, and their comments are consistently insightful.  Please feel welcome to join the conversation!

We do our best to update with new content a few times a week, but unfortunately we’re currently wading into final exams, so don’t expect much for the next week or so.  When we emerge from the other side, though, you’ll hopefully have more to read than ever—the summer should afford us more time to play games and write about them.  We also have a podcast, but we haven’t updated it in a while.  We will remedy this soon!  Expect a new episode in about a week.

In the meantime, why not check out some of our older writing that you may not have read?  Laura’s Learning Dwarf Fortress is about navigating the ASCII graphics and online community of one of the world’s strangest and most awesome games.  I wrote a piece called Becoming Art about why we need more games like Demon’s Souls, and Laura wrote a response about why Max Payne is awesome anyways.  In Fable II I got a sex change, and it was strange.  Read about it in My Experiences as a Transsexual Lesbian in Albion (complete with video!).

We also want to say thank you.  Thanks for stopping by.  Thanks for the engaging discussions and the kind words.  We’re only getting started and we hope you’ll stick around.

7 Comments
by Kent Sutherland on May 26, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Musings

Posted by Kent Sutherland on May 26, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/05/26/salutations-new-readers/

Logical Journey

In 1997, I made a new best friend.

He was the son of an incredibly famous person, but I didn’t know this at the time. I actually remember my parents being rather shocked when they met his mother—as I learned much later, she’d been all over the news for reasons related to Bill Clinton’s government appointments. For some reason, they moved to my area just before September 1997, and now her son was in my school. Let’s call him Ricardo. He was in my third-grade class for a single year.

Ricardo was absurdly charismatic. He had twelve kinds of Napoleonic complexes, claimed to have read Hamlet, and showed off his family’s wealth with a shameless, mesmerizing kind of pride. He spent nearly every Reading Hour arguing with the teacher about whether or not he was permitted to spend the period reading the dictionary. He started a club “about Egypt.” He started another one “about Rome.” He got half our entire grade to sign the membership lists. He wore little polo shirts instead of t-shirts or turtlenecks. Despite not being Hispanic, he had a haircut like a novela actor, and he pulled it off. For whatever reason, we all thought he was awesome.

And he wanted to be my best friend. See, we both played the same computer games: we were absolutely hooked on edu-games made by The Learning Company. There was Treasure Mountain, Treasure Cove, Treasure Mathstorm and Treasure Galaxy, all math games; then there was Reading Rabbit and its bland successors. Additionally, we loved Broderbund’s The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, a logic game he and I both begged our parents to buy out of that year’s book fair catalog. We were obsessed. We’d go over to each other’s houses and sit for hours to watch each other play. We solved math problems together. We discussed secrets and strategies. He had a computer of his own, and it was in his room. He was the smartest and luckiest kid I knew. But he was new in school, and his friendships were all nervous alliances of awe and mistrust, and I was pretty awkward and lonely myself. So I guess we were good for each other.

There’s one day in particular from that year that I still remember. I arrived at his house sometime in the early morning; we ran upstairs to his bedroom, where he still had Zoombinis running from the night before. I plopped down in the chair next to his and was rather horrified by what I saw happening on the screen.

“What have you done?” I asked.

Ricardo settled down in the rolling office-chair his parents have given him, crossed his legs on the seat, and gave me a look. “I haven’t done anything,” he said.

“But you have two of each Zoombini,” I said.

The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis is a selection of logic puzzles which focus on pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, and deductive reasoning skills.  The chief elements of each puzzle are the Zoombinis themselves—little blue fellows, a bit like punk-rock Mr. Potato Heads, each with a different arrangement of facial features, nose colors, hairstyles and limbs. Many of the puzzles involve arranging the Zoombinis in series or matrixes according to which facial features they have in common. Failure usually results in one or two Zoombinis getting left behind. Run out of Zoombinis, and you fail.

You’ll have to work quickly to get them through the puzzles and out of harm’s way: as players progress through the difficulty levels, not only do the puzzles get harder, but they begin to incorporate timers, penalties, and three-strikes-you’re out mechanics. I remember feeling the difficulty level increase, as if the air around me were filling with smoke, or some frantic kind of fear-gas. As a kid, I felt these logic puzzles viscerally. I began as a logic-starved whelp : by the time I began to tackle the highest difficulty levels, I could tell that I had grown mentally. I’m pretty sure that my brain was actually altered by this game.

The genius thing about it was that your own choices—the Zoombinis you designed for your team at the start of each play session—were one of the primary sources of difficulty. The more diverse you made them as a group, the tougher it got to solve some of the puzzles, particularly the ones that required you to arrange them by shared elements. You’re not supposed to have two of each Zoombini. You’re supposed to be battling against the clock with a crowd of misfits. Against all odds, even self-imposed ones, you’re shepherding them across this puzzle-studded wilderness to safety at the end of the overworld map. The final destination is Zoombinivile, and the Zoombinis, in fact, are refugees. The plot is: you’re rescuing these refugee Mr. Potato Heads from a dark and stormy prison-island with the righteous power of pure logic. It’s glorious.

So, having two of each Zoombini is cheating, I thought. Unquestionably. I could feel in my bones that it was a shortcut, an unfair advantage, and an unforgivable sin. Having two of each Zoombini makes each puzzle twice as easy.

I could not express my horror. Ricardo just smirked. “You know, if you double-click on the ‘make Zoombini’ button when you’re designing them at the start of the map, you make each Zoombini twice,” he said. “You get two of each instead of only one.”

“But that’s cheating!” I exclaimed.

“No, it isn’t. Why does the game let you do it if it’s cheating?”

He had a good point, but my world was falling apart. We argued for a long time about what constituted a ‘fair’ game of Zoombinis. “You have to follow the spirit of the law, not the letter,” I proclaimed. It was a garbled version of a phrase I’d just learned from my father, and I thought it sounded dramatic.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Ricardo told me.

I suppose it makes a kind of symbolic, cosmic justice that the first gamer friend of mine to play a game with shrewdness and corner-cutting slyness, the first of my friends to take confident possession of an exploit, was Ricardo, the son of United States politicians. But that’s a trite and useless observation for me to make, really, and I feel kind of stupid making it. Ricardo didn’t teach me how to cheat; he taught me how to think about games. He taught me when to take my head out of the game-world and look at it from the outside. He taught me when to mess with the system and when to play by its rules. Before our argument about Zoombinis, I’d regarded games as rigorous but entertaining exercises passed down to me from some higher power, totally immune to my criticism or critical thinking: I’d perform the required actions and receive fun, like a hamster in a laboratory cage. After my  Zoombinis revelation, I began to look at my games with suspicion. I began prodding at them, manipulating them instead of letting myself be manipulated by them.

At the end of the day, I went home and started up my own copy of the game. I started a new game session, beginning at the Zoombinis’ home base. As I put a new team of them together, my sister ran up to watch.

“How do you do that?” she gasped.

“Do what?” I asked.

But I already knew what she was going to ask. “How do you have two of each Zoombini?”

I shrugged like it was nothing. “You double-click the ‘Make Zoombinis’ button each time you make one. It makes two instead of one.”

“Oh.” She stood there for a while, watching as I assembled a team of lifeless clones. “Doesn’t it make the game too easy?” she asked. “Are you still, like, doing logic?”

I was still doing logic, yeah. Just… a different kind of logic.

21 Comments
by lauramichet on May 21, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Musings, PC
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by lauramichet on May 21, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/05/21/logical%c2%a0journey/

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