When No One's Watching: On Dishonored (2012)

A view from high above in Dishonored

After I'd finished Dishonored, I was curious to see how its chaos mechanic worked, exactly, so I looked it up. Dishonored was a game released in 2012, developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. You play as an assassin, and there was a “chaos” system in play that wasn’t fully explained within the game itself, only a screen that told you that killing more people would mean a “darker outcome”. I was wondering if it was simply a case that killing more enemies would = higher chaos and a worse ending, and yeah, it basically was. I also came across a forum post¹ that argued that Dishonored discouraged players from engaging in a high chaos playstyle, and that that was a mistake because killing was a lot more fun in the game than stealth. Dishonored gives you a range of gadgets and supernatural powers, but most of them were either noisy or lethal. Dishonored only allows the player to take out enemies non-lethally in only two ways: choke them out from behind, or shoot them with a sleep dart. The poster found enemy encounters boring because of this limited interaction with them; they found himself reloading often once they got spotted, because enemies are difficult to take out non-lethally head-on, so they found it easier to reload the game instead. Then they watched videos of other people's playthroughs; they watched other players kill enemies with their own bullets by stopping time, possessing them, and moving them into the path of the bullet they'd just fired. They saw players shoot grenades out of the air by stopping time, and they watched other players incinerate enemies by wind-blasting (that’s a magic power you can get in the game) them into Arcs of Light (which were electrical force fields that electrocuted anyone that touched them). But more than that, the game included a morality system, and it explicitly tells you in loading screens that the story would get darker and that there would be consequences if you went the high chaos route and killed too many people. The game was telling you that the “right” choice in this game was to avoid killing whenever possible, but to play the game “right” would limit the variety of enemy interactions and the creativity you could use, and all of this was something that the developers had built into their own game.

(Not) Seeing the World Through a Mini-map - On Mini-maps in Sleeping Dogs, Grand Theft Auto, and Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear Solid's Radar

I remember a couple years back, re-playing Metal Gear Solid and thinking it would make a great flash game.  The stealth sections, specifically, where you're perhaps in a room trying to reach the exit, and there are guards patrolling the area that you have to avoid.  Because what actually ends up happening is you're playing through these sections not watching your character all that much, but instead the little minimap in the corner that represents your radar, making sure your dot never enters the cones of vision of any of the guards or security cameras.  Go onto any flash game portal, and you'll see that's occurred to a lot of people.  Zoom in on the mini-map, Remove all the extraneous controls outside of movement, and you have a straightforward mechanic you can replicate with simple geometric shapes, no art skills required.  The radar is completely unrealistic, of course: how would a radar show you what guards are looking at?  And then there’s the fact that all these guards are so short-sighted that they can only ever see several feet in front of them.  Stealth in Metal Gear Solid is an overtly game-y and unrealistic mechanic, but then again, it's not like the game was particularly slavish to realism anyways.  And because stealth is built around the mini-map as a central component of gameplay, these sections work, which is why even if you take out everything else and focus only on the mini-map, the game still functions pretty well.

Minimaps are a user interface component that have become especially prevalent with the advent of open world games in the past decade and a half or so.  Given large maps which players can easily get lost in, a large number of collectables, enemies that can come from any direction, and multiple missions you can start at a time, there needs to be some way to convey to the player a lot of spatial information.   Mini-maps are a fine tool for this.  But they don’t always completely fix all these problems, and sometimes, they can introduce new ones, especially if you’re just using them because everyone else is, without thinking through how they’re being integrated into the game at large.  Like, for example, in GTA IV.

More Songs! Neutral Milk Hotel, Oceansize, Sunny Day Real Estate

These are some of the songs I would've been listening to maybe five years ago, in the fall while walking outside.

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over The Sea

Medium Expectations: On Gome Home (2013)

Sam's bedroom

Five minutes: that's how long it took Gone Home to let me down.  It wasn't a big thing, really.  The game starts you off at the front door of a house, luggage at my feet and a locked front door beckoning.  I was Katie, a young woman back from a trip to Europe, and I'd arrived at night, with darkness enveloping everything beyond the porch.  A steady torrent of rain beats down, punctuated by occasional thunder and lightning, which lent a sense of urgency to the proceedings: don't you want to get out of the rain and cold?  I'd just figured out how to unlock the front doors, and now I was inside the lobby.  It was an actual relief entering the house and putting walls between me and the raging storm outside.  I took a look around, the first glimpse at the eerie, creaky, antiquated house that my younger sister Samantha (or Sam) and my parents were living in, although most of that was probably was the dark stillness, and the house would be more welcoming in the morning.  None of them were here apparently for my homecoming; the note on the door from Samantha had said as much.  My parents were on holiday, my sister had something to deal with.  So, I contemplated the wooden staircase in front of me, and the doors to either side.  Then I turned around, went back outside, and tried to pick up my bags, still on the porch, to bring them inside.  No dice.  Trying to pick them up had been one of the first things I'd tried to do when the game started, but left-click had done nothing, and neither did the spacebar, e, or u keys.  Perhaps now that I had the front doors open, Katie would logically have a better reason to want to pick them up, and the game would let me move them inside, away from the outdoors, but unfortunately, the bags still proved unresponsive.  The game wasn't able to interpret what I was trying to do, what I felt was a logical thing to do, and what I felt was a logical thing for my character to do, and that brought me out of the moment, if only for a bit.  This was a small thing, of course, that I was being bothered by, and you can forgive small things.  But it’s often these small surprises and disappointments that can stick with you, long after you finish a game.

AJAX, States, and Pushstate()

AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. Many popular websites make use of AJAX, for example Google and Twitter. To understand why it's being used, we have to understand how the traditional World Wide Web was meant to be built. The web was intended to work like this: you use a web browser application (eg. Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari) on your computer to visit a web page, by giving the browser that page's URL address (eg. http://www.google.com). The browser, or client, connects to a web server via the internet and requests that web page, which is merely a text file, specifically an HTML file. That server serves that file back to the client browser, and the browser displays that page, also requesting any additional files such as images needed to completely display that page. You can then click on a hyperlink to visit another web page, and your browser goes and connects to whatever web server is that file is stored on to get that page. But as the web has matured, websites have gotten more complicated, bigger, and more visual, and the basic HTML web model has become obsolete. We moved from mostly text-based pages to websites consisting of many web pages, all with consistent visual elements (eg. logo in the top left, a navigational menu along the top or side, a footer) which are there to make the web more user friendly. We've also developed new technologies, like CSS, Javascript, and PHP, to supplement our basic HTML websites, and one of these technologies is AJAX.

Ha Jin's The Bridegroom (2000) Book Review

In "The Bridegroom," Ha Jin seems more interested in writing stories about circumstances than about people. Almost all of the short stories collected in his 2000 book are concerned with lower and middle class folk living in China, struggling against greater, sometimes conflicting, forces: communism and capitalism, encroaching western values and small town prejudices, societal pressures and familial obligations, and an overarching bureaucracy trying to stabilize and control a vast population in a country in transition. The stories explore life within this paradoxical environment, and are much more preoccupied with introducing and stepping through the injustices and dilemmas facing the characters than the characters themselves; they are powerless to effect the unfolding situations imposed upon them, and develop little more nuance beyond "worried businessman" and "foreign-educated woman". This lends a universality of sorts, and the stories do well in presenting different tableaus, even if the stories tend to beat somewhat repetitious drums. As a pounding critique of life in China it may work, but the futility that permeates all the stories leads to a sameness, and at some point all of the senselessness starts bleeding out, such that it's hard not to redirect some of it onto the stories themselves. 

Videos of live performances from The Weakerthans, Steven Page, and Gorillaz

The Weakerthans - Fallow (acoustic on Backstage Pass)