Once More, With Stealing - On Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist (2015)

From the designer of The Stanley Parable, comes Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terrible Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist! It’s free! It’s short! I’d recommend playing both games first before reading this!

Now, onto our main attraction!

AIMless: On Catherine (2011)

I played Catherine pretty soon after playing Emily is Away (which I wrote about here), and those are pretty interesting experiences back to back.  You could almost imagine Catherine being the continuation of the story of the protagonist from Emily is Away twelve years later, even though their mindsets are different.  But both games try to catalog relationships with the opposite sex from the male perspective, and neither are much interested in simply telling a tale of romance.

On True Detective Season 1

DVD Cover for True Detective Season 1 (Wikipedia)

We don't want to watch stories about good guys anymore. That's what it seems like, if we look at the popular, critically acclaimed TV dramas of the moment. It's been happening for a while now, a corrosion of the line between good and evil on our screens. Superman's boring -- you can't write him interesting, you have to write around him -- but even Wolverine's standard fare now. We've gone beyond flawed protagonists, beyond every-man anti-heroes, and our pop culture seems to want to keep pushing further and further afield.  Now?  We're at Suicide Squad and Deadpool -- people that should be locked up, pychopaths, the criminally insane.  And that say nothing good about us, right?  Or that's how I think that slippery slope's supposed to go; someone else wrote something trying to plot a moral trajectory of our superhero films, so go look for that if you want.

But outside of the overloaded slate of superhero films – or, actually, as a cause of it -- movie studios are scared as hell, cluelessly groping around for what can even constitute a safe tentpole blockbuster anymore, and ending up with weird reboots and Apatow-y envelope-pushing comedies and lots of spies having to go off the grid. Television, meanwhile, – well, mainly HBO, and FX, and AMC -- seem suddenly enraptured with getting prestige, brooding, masculine, "adult" dramas greenlit at the moment.

HBO's True Detective is a good example of this.  The second season was apparently bad, and I'm not going to watch it, but the first season was highly acclaimed.  And it's so not-at-all interested in pushing a good guy on the viewer, but it even goes beyond that. Writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto is aggressively uninterested in making Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson's characters relateable, or, really, any of the people on the show. There are moments interspersed to soften the blows, but not many, and they don't balance out with how the show makes sure to remind you how terrible human nature is. You might compare them to Walt from Breaking Bad if we're talking about unlikeable protagonists, but Breaking Bad was different: it wanted to make you root for him in the beginning, and it grounded his actions with a base of logic and conviction before slowly stripping away the rationalizations. True Detective doesn't reveal such an obvious throughline or arching purpose in its protagonists.

In Defense of Free to Wait Games

Jim Sterling (of The Jimquisition, formerly of The Escapist) put out a review and also a video last year about a game called Dungeon Keeper Mobile.  Here's the review, and here's the video:

The Jimquisition - Free to Wait

Dungeon Keeper Mobile kicked up a bit of fuss when it was announced.  It was a mobile revival of a long dormant franchise that had its heyday in the 90s.  (Fun fact for those that don't know, Peter Molyneux worked on it).  And Electronic Arts decided to shamelessly cash in on that IP and they turned what was a strategic, well remembered PC game into a "free to play," "pay to win," "casual" game for mobile devices.  Or so the story goes.

I haven't played Dungeon Keeper Mobile, and I doubt I ever will.  I haven't played a lot of these "free to play" games.  If I have free time with nothing but my phone, I'll generally read something on it instead.  But then these games aren't for me.

Jim Sterling, in the video, complained about how little there was to do in Dungeon Keeper Mobile.  You'd start the game, click a couple times to place down a few blocks or dig or put things down, and that was it; you'd have to wait a couple hours for that task to complete before you could do anything else.  That was the "gameplay."  Sterling focused on the fact that the game would harangue you to pay some real money to speed up the process.  It's a game that seems built primarily to make money off the weak-willed, by making the waits agonizingly long.  It's temporarily holding your gameplay hostage, for money.

And I'm going to try to defend them.

Forgetting You, But Not the Time: On Emily is Away (2015)

Emily is Away (2015)

(some spoilers)

Late last year I saw an article about this game called Emily is Away in Wired. The headline caught my interest: it said the game was AIM-inspired and set in the 2000s. Generally, I don't like reading too much about games I think I might play in the future; I wrote about how pre-set expectations changed my experience with Gone Home before. So I didn’t read the article. But I saw the game get articles in other publications as well. And I saw that Emily Short had written about it, and I made a mental note to definitely give the game a shot at some point. (Her review is here). But even though I’d avoided reading articles about the game, I still couldn’t avoid reading all those headlines, and though I can't find it again, I'd seen one article/blog/forum post/Youtube title which said the game was about getting friend-zoned. Remember expectations? Yeah, there they were, being pre-set.

The Marcio Rubio Glitch and Soundbyte Culture

Slate - Rubio v Christie on Experience

(Warning: US politics!)

Is soundbite culture still a thing that people talk about? It's the sort of term that I associate with Jon Stewart maybe a couple years back. Remember, how one of his big pet topics on the Daily Show was the 24-hour news cycle and its perpetual ravenous need for breathless, urgent, completely shallow news stories? Soundbite culture was all tied to that: how politicians were adapting to the way news media operated, and how they, knowing how what all those organizations wanted was the compact 30-second talking head to splice into their news coverage, how these politicians were tailoring their speeches and interviews to ensure that the half a minute that did make it in was exactly, EXACTLY what they wanted to say. That's what mattered, because the majority of voters (that were even paying attention) aren't ever going to see your full news scrum; they're just gonna see what the news media decides is worth showing.

But it's gone beyond just the news. It's embedded into our generation now, with likes and shares and hashtags. Our always-online culture puts emphasis on “viralness,” on shareability, on the easy-to-digest, and that's pervading into corporations, brands, entertainment, news, and yes, it's still definitely there in politics as well. There are now consulting firms, whole industries built on harnessing the power of word-of-smartphone and keyboard.  Soundbite culture isn't just being driven by 24-hour news; it's now a part of social media.  It's gone digital.

Which brings us to Mario Rubio.

So at the Eighth GOP debate on Saturday, there was an exchange between Rubio and Chris Christie which is going viral:  Slate - Marco Rubio Was a Disaster in the GOP Debate

Here's the Media Matters overview of news coverage on the matter. Media Matters - "Marcobot": Media Rail Against Marco Rubio After His "Disastrous" Debate Gaffe

Let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barrack Obama doesn't know what's he's doing. He know's exactly what he's doing.”

Rubio said basically this line four times; three of those was within consecutive answers, in an exchange between him and Christie on if Rubio was ready to be president. Worst of all, after Christie called him out on “the memorized 25-second speech that is exactly what [Rubio's] advisers gave him,” Rubio, obviously rattled and unprepared for both Christie's attack and the boos that are starting to drown out his answers, freezes up, and can't think of anything to do but to repeat that exact line again. “Here's the bottom line, this notion that Barrack Obama -” Christie interjects “There it is. There's the memorized 25-second speech!” Rubio, frustrated, almost goes into the spiel again, beginning with “this notion...” before catching himself this time.

Some people seem to think this could sink his campaign. It's definitely going to change the media narrative for Rubio heading into New Hampshire. Before, in a race of a bunch of un-serious, extreme candidates and floundering, unexciting moderates, he was the establishment candidate that seemed like the best hope for anyone that didn't want Trump or Cruz as the Republican nominee. Now, after the Rubio glitch and a relatively strong showing from Jeb! Bush, there are even articles coming out saying Bush could emerge as the establishment candidate now.

What was Rubio thinking? Certainly I think inexperience and an inability to think on his feet partly led to Rubio's gaffe, and those are probably going to be the big questions raised about him for the foreseeable future. He's not used to political speech-making and debating, and he's crammed a lot for those two areas in the last couple months, trained relentlessly to be ready for the big stages, and it shows. He always did come off as a bit over-rehearsed, a bit robotic -- press him on this topic, this preset answer emerges -- although it never seemed like quite as big of an issue before this. He's not used to give and take with the other candidates or the crowd, and he froze up, rushing to talk over the boos with whatever came to mind first. Trump responds to boos with a carefree shrug; that same debate he called out some boobirds after one of his responses as being Bush donors and special interests, and that might play well with his supporters. But Rubio, faced with the same, short circuited instead. Maybe the mounting pressure got to him. Maybe he was tired, not getting enough sleep. But, well, if any press is good press, then Rubio, who's been fighting along with anyone else running not named Trump for some spotlight, well, he's finally going to be getting a narrative the news media can sink its teeth into.

Improvisation really isn't a good skill to have to demonstrate, for a politician. Wander too far off-script, and you're only going to end up tripping yourself up; that's when you're going to say something stupid, that's when you give the news media the 30-second clip they're looking for and you're not looking to give up. Especially if you're not used to giving answers in front of large crowds, answers that are going to be dissected endlessly afterwards by media panels and columnists and radio hosts and snarky commenters on Twitter, looking for that single moment that you slip up. Trump gets away with it, but that's because he's not a politician (he just plays one on TV), and he appeals to the people that hate all politicians anyway. Rubio can't, nor can Clinton, or Cruz, or Bush, or Sanders.

Speaking about Bernie Sanders, you can see something similar in how he debates. He doesn't riff on foreign policy; he goes back to talking points. He talks about Iraq. He'll give just enough preamble related to the question so his answer doesn't seem completely ridiculous, then he'll circle back to income inequality. Part of that is the fear of going off rails, part of that is sticking with what you know, and part of that is hammering home a talking point. Maybe it makes him seem one note. But that repetition isn't going to get a ton of wider media coverage or social media attention (at least not unless he actually becomes the Democrat nominee, I don't think). It isn't going to put him on the bad side of the soundbite culture either in the news or social media. If there's a snippet of him, it's gonna be one where he's going to come off as polished and certain. Political strategists refer to it as message discipline. All the candidates do it. Politicians can't actually run on sprawling, hundred-page policy platforms. They need to boil things down to simple messages that people are going to remember: glimpses, a strong impression, a couple sticky lines that are repeated over and over, in every debate, every stump speech, every quoted line they ever hear or see from them. Bernie will fight against income inequality and Wall Street. Trump speaks his mind, and he's going to turn America from losers back into winners. Hillary's fighting for you; she's fighting for families, children, women, and she's experienced and strong. Cruz will stand up against Washington and for conservative values, and be strong against immigration and terrorism. Rubio's team knew that the question about his inexperience was going to come up.  And they were ready, with a talking point, or at least they thought they were.  

Rubio's team obviously thought there'd be a comparison between Rubio inexperience and Obama's: that's what'd been in the news, what Christie had been been saying on the campaign trail. Obama had also been an inexperienced senator running for presidency back in 2008, and look where that had left us! That was going to come up, and Rubio's answer would be that the issue with Obama wasn't his inexperience; it wasn't that Obama didn't know what he was doing. It was that what Obama wanted to do was wrong, and so Rubio wasn't like Obama at all. And that's a fine enough type of response to that specific question.

I think it was both over-preparation and under-preparation that did Rubio in. His team must've drilled into him, over and over, spend the first half answering the question, but make sure you hit one of your talking points and hammer it home at the end. It must've been so ingrained into Rubio, all that debate preparation, that he reflexively goes into whatever talking point best matches the topic at hand. Once it went from the structured moderator question, though, and Rubio had to respond after Christie argues that senators don't have the experience necessary to be president, Rubio counters, he attacks Christie's record, then he goes right back into the Obama talking point. And then Christie hits back with the “25-second memorized speech,” and it all falls apart.

I think you might also be able to see another debate strategy that might've been drilled into Rubio the last while: doubling down. You can see Rubio knocked off balance with how Christie shined a light directly on the way he's been structuring his debate answers; it must be like suddenly being told not to think about the way you breathe, or being told that you have a conversational tic you weren't aware of when you're in the middle of saying something. In these debates, you rarely ever see anyone back down, because that shows weakness. After Christie attacks him, Rubio fires back, and then he tries re-iterating the Obama thing, and I think in his head he actually wanted to make sure the difference between him and Obama landed. But the line doesn't work even once, and said again it just disintegrates, even if Christie hadn't pointed it out.

The worst thing about the line is that even teed up correctly, it's pretty bad. Well, no, actually, the worst thing was Rubio repeating it. But I can understand him freezing up. That talking point, though, was rehearsed, and a couple members of Rubio's team must have heard it a lot. Someone should've cleaned it up along the way. “Let's dispel once and for all with the fiction” is clunky and way too formal. It sticks in your mind for the wrong reason, because it sounds weird. “Obama knows exactly what he's doing” is actually the part of the speech that stands out the most in the whole spiel, because it's following “...fiction that Obama doesn't know what he's doing,” and the repetition makes the second line stick, which definitely isn't what Rubio's team actually wanted to emphasize. They want people to know that Obama wanted America to be more like the rest of the world, while Rubio wants to make America great again. Which is fine; it's generic but talking points can be generic, as long as the sentiment comes across. Without the awkward beginning, and with a smoother transition into it from Rubio, the talking point would'be been fine. But when you're dispelling with fictions and telling people that Obama knows exactly what he's doing, boilerplate about making America great again is just background noise. The talking point would've been pretty mediocre said once; that it was rehearsed and meant to be a capper, and that both those aspects came across all too terribly on the first run through and were amplified every time Rubio said it again, that's where it really fails.

I should say this: I didn't watch the debate. I saw clips of it, and read articles on it. I think a lot of other people also rely on articles and highlights as well; otherwise Slate wouldn't be putting up things like The CNN Republican Debate in Under Two Minutes (which is just a video) and NY Times wouldn't have Highlights from the Eighth GOP Debate.  That's what the politicians have to think about: what 30 seconds, what highlights, are going to be clipped from their hours on the stage that night?  What's going to end up being shared, what's going to end up being dissected, become emblematic in a "narrative" about you, end up in an attack ad, end up going viral?  In this social media landscape, you don't want to be memorable for the wrong reasons.  Being boring for most of it is fine, as long as you're looking vaguely presidential and not tripping over your answers.  Hit your couple key lines, maybe land some attacks on some of the others if you're up for it, and that's a pretty solid performance.  If you end up repeating bland things, it's going to be forgotten; concentrate on what you want to stick, what you want highlighted, what you want to reinforce about yourself and the other people on the stage.  Marco Rubio erred the wrong way, though. He was trying to keep on-message, and I have to think that that talking point was him trying to curtail the inexperience question while hoping the rest of the debate would make up for it: a single, not a home run. Instead, he, I dunno, hit himself in the head with the bat?  We'll see if he can recover.

Here's something else that's changed with the shift from soundbites to soundbytes.  News, and political coverage, it used to just be about being informed.  The media would report on this stuff, and you'd watch it or read it, because you felt you should: it was Important.  Now, though, on social media, politics can become more of a horse race, a sport.  You watch, you root, and you get invested.  Just look at how ingrained poll reporting and poll watching have gotten now; it's because politics has gone social.  Poll reporting has to be the best thing in the world for news media. I have to imagine it generates lots of traffic and interest for relatively little work.  This, even though everyone "knows" that polls are constantly having to adjust to the the general shift away from landline phones, that they're untrustworthy, that their methods are always in a state of flux and they're reliant on historical models that could always blow up in a moment.  But still, poll results are blared and shared seemingly everywhere.  It's become "news."  It makes sense: the people most likely to care deeply about politics are the people who should generally probably have an idea who they want to win already; now they have a way to find other people just as invested, and suddenly, people who have nothing to do with any candidate's actual campaign are nevertheless now fandoms.  But still, online communities are just bubbles: Sanders might be able to look on Twitter to take the temperature of what many of his supporters are thinking, but the people that'll be actually voting at the GOP primaries?  I'm not sure if Twitter's necessarily more representative of the voting public than landline phone surveys.  Analog, unaccompanied, soundbites -- as in, conservative talk radio -- that might still what decides it for the Republican party.

One more thing: what about Jeb!? Jeb Bush seemed like he was dead in the water a while back, and now there's articles about how he still has a chance. The media was laughing at him for so long that people were maybe starting to feel sorry for him, because whatever you want to say about him, he's certainly stuck to his very moderate guns, while Rubio was running into trouble even before this, trying to steer hard right – from supporting amnesty -- on the immigration issue. Media – both news and social – narratives can really be so weird sometimes. Originally looking so ineffectual, Jeb as the GOP nominee might be looking like a better and better idea the further into the process we get.  He still has the political infrastructure, which hasn't translated into actual support yet, but well, we'll see what happens from here.

Civilization and Ruin: Fallout 3 Vs. Fallout: New Vegas

I should probably get this done before Fallout 4 releases, right?

So: Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It's pretty rare to have such an apples-to-apples comparison between games and their developers. Fallout 3 was released in 2008 and developed by Bethesda Game Studios; Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, developed by Obsidian Entertainment. They both take place in the same in-game universe, they were both developed using the same engine, and they both ostensibly share the exact same underlying gameplay mechanics and genre. These are games from two of the biggest western RPG game studios around (Bioware's also there, of course), but although both studios sort of share the same philosophy of providing freedom, choice, "open-worldness," and player-driven gameplay, how that ethos manifests in their actual games is actually pretty different.

There's also this divide between the players, and it isn't just that people slightly prefer one over the other; the emotions run higher than that*. Fallout 3 is, I think, going to come to be one of the defining games of the Xbox 360/PS3 era, and for the generation growing up on those consoles, it's going to define what video games ARE, pretty much. And a lot of those people played New Vegas afterwards and found it boring, and restrictive; they thought it didn't measure up. And then there's the people that consider New Vegas one of the best RPGs of the last couple years, who detest Fallout 3 and that hate everything Bethesda did to the franchise (if they played 1 or 2 first). Sure, there's a middle ground, but there's also a lot of people that feel very strongly about this. So what makes Bethesda's Fallout so different from Obsidian's? One of the biggest, I think? Bethesda's games get better as you move away from their games' cities and people, but those are the areas where Obsidian's games excel the most.