The Blood of the Gamer

He didn’t start filming himself in order to talk it through with us. He needed the pain to be multiplied by a million online screens and speakers so it’d hurt as much as he judged it ought to. The more of us that saw him skin his knuckles against the wall, the worse it would be.

What was the nature of pain if that was how his pain worked? Why was he allowing all that extra pain to be witnessed over the top of him? He was intentionally destroying himself in these ways that were impossible before the advent of online videos – not to hurt us (though we were near enough to hurt), but to send existence a message, to warn the room, to doom himself in the process – to let the game finally finish him off – except he was not doomed to some gamer’s hell. I imagine his life continued. He was not a martyr of this “pain magnification by million screens”, either. He got something in return. I’m not talking about attention, I’m talking about presence.

He had milk somehow sticking to his face (a complete accident). To express his out-of-control episode, he pointed out the milk. The milk confirmed it was the moment he thought it was. No, he would not clean it right there and then (the blood the wall). He stood and waited to pass through the lowest point in his life. He looked at the blood and he grieved. He looked at the milk and he stood in disbelief.

Strangely, the part I remembered most vividly was the least-extreme part of the tape. It was at the very beginning.

The boy put the camera down, stepped back, straightened himself, centered his position in the frame, looked into what he imagined were my eyes, and said, “Okay. I’ve been playing fucking Call of Duty for fucking seventeen hours straight”.

That game had been for sale for less than 24 hours. Such a video could not be made at a later time; his feelings could not last forever and he also couldn’t wait for them to simply pass because, as I’ve said, he was standing at the edge of his life as he knew it. Call of Duty had taken things to ahead, very suddenly, after a long 17 hours.

The person who made this video (I imagine) went on and lived. But the boy in that video was killed. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 cannot stop.

The wall-punching made the video; the act itself in a vacuum, though, was meaningless – barely shocking, barely repulsive; it was below even such things as disgrace and pity.

But his punch… it followed-through on something that began at the moment he said, “Okay. I’ve been playing fucking Call of Duty.”

You don’t air yourself plainly saying “Okay. I’ve been playing Call of Duty,” with no thrills, performance, obvious end-goals or presented context of it leading into, like, some actual review or preview. You don’t do that without taking the whole thing somewhere very real, very quick. Without that, you fail to justify why you’re even talking about a fake videogame experience thing, in the first place, in such a one-note kind of way.

So he punched wall, he showed that he held a point, a point realer than any of the above.

The Z Fan

What was the connection between this and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End?

Nathan, Sam and Rafe. We don’t have Jesus in the plot of Uncharted 4 but we have an extra asshole thief to make up for it.

Nathan Drake was the repenter thief. The other two were the asshole thief who went to hell.

After Nate’s mercy counterbalanced Sam’s severity and caused Nate to fall off the cliff and Nadine to live, a loving, forgiving Elena Drake appeared above a whoozy Nathan Drake shortly afterwards. Nate was saved.

Elena’s appearance was too convenient – many said so.

This all happened soon after Drake arrived at the ancient city, which is usually where Uncharted does its supernatural twist. But this time Uncharted just had Christ blessing Nate with a deus ex machina which saved his life and rebuilt his broken marriage. Nate earned it because of his repentance – rejecting Mad Sam, risking his life to spare Nadine. Jesus approved.

Nate’s “feelings” here had a thematic connection to the sea. The game opened on a stormy sea (Nate regretted going with Sam a lot at this point), then it went to a flashback which ended with Nathan leaping into the sea (abandoning Sam), the story focused on sea-fairing pirates and even ended with Drake living peacefully by the sea. Sea dog that he is. But then the mercenary company you fought was called “Shoreline,” (see!) and its leader Nadine… check out her crucifix-arms in the screenshot of that pivotal moment where Nate earns Elena back.

But surely Nadine can’t be a stand-in for Christ. She doesn’t acknowledge or appreciate Nate’s mercy/repentance (or even just the fact he saved her life). She abandons the thieves at the end, they’re all equally fucked, in her eyes. Nate isn’t special to her…

Nadine is a feminine given name. It is the French variant of the name “Nadia” itself being the diminutive of Russian name Nadezhda.^[1] It is also commonly used amongst Arabic communities and in Arabic may mean نادين “Admonitory/Messenger,” “Showerer of blessings.”

Uh?

And Sam – Samael? The one who caused the events that tore down Nathan’s life but enabled it to be rebuilt into something nicer in the end… in the end, Nate has nothing to really hold against his brother, does he? His brother actually did him a favor by fucking it all up. That, after all, is how Nathan got blessed and ended up living in paradise.

You shouldn’t have your cake and eat it, too, Nathan. Not that you can’t…

2018 – 2020: The Strange Video Game Reporter Is Largely Gone

“Can you play it again?”

*Clicking sound*

“In the end, it wasn’t his personal vibe, it really was just what he held (in contrast with what I held). This is what set the tone that came between us. Yes, it was obvious – the man may be mysterious, but he’s not some spy or… the man before me wasn’t lining up to buy it. I could sense the intention with which he stood there, holding his copy of Mario Kart 8 for Wii U – me, with my copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. His eye contact gave it away. Even if I’m wrong and he didn’t plan our conversation, I was bound by the social law of the surprised to say something, to point out how we held the same game, and yet, how they weren’t the same game. One was for the Wii U. How can anything on Switch be similar to a game on Wii U? You buy MK8D to play the Switch. I’d been tormenting myself for a month and a half. Do I buy it again? But is it really buying it again? I had just started working my first job and I had an amount of money I was not yet used to, this was my first test as an adult. He noticed me as I stood there at the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe shelf. That must have been when he ducked into the Wii U section.”

*Clicking sound*

“I remember those times. I was there, hell, I may as well have been that boy buying it twice. Ah, the directionless yet unmatched anticipation of the Switch at that point in time, it having proven itself. Still little to come in the coming months but Wii U ports but you knew so damn hard that something magic was in the air that you saw that the ports somehow carried a newness to them that wiped off whatever superficial staleness they otherwise reeked of. Some kind of expansion upon what Breath of the Wild had started, somehow. The system had a voice of its own and it was talking to you.”

“It was.”

“It doesn’t anymore.”

“No, unfortunately.”

“This boy – he was doing his best to listen to the air. He knew that the box – heck, even the screen – was lying to him – it wasn’t the same game. The Switch, she grows – healthy and green – off of the dead.”

“So what happened to the reporter?”

“Outside of the Yakuza 0 guy that he was interviewing for a couple of years – now we really see why, hey – his trail runs cold. Straight-up stiffens. Who knows what really happened to him.”

“He wrote down, “GTA is King. Zelda is Queen” and walked away from it all?”

“You mean from the typing? Well, that’s what I wonder. We might not figure out what really happened to him, but we can start with one thing – he clearly loved the Switch.”

“He had an article in the works about someone transitioning to a Switch-only lifestyle. A thing of zero excess. A thing that presents itself to you ethically. Real climate disaster sacrifices that all things will eventually have to make. A true leader.”

“I caught him again, actually, but I was all by myself, playing a single-player game.”

“Which game?”

“The game that was – for a time – his game.”

“So it’s been years since you’ve seen him.”

“And I miss him. So, I was in the upper-left corner of the map.”

“Dark, snowing.”

“That’s it. Over the edge. Right off the sheer edge, where the game has nothing but space between its world and the background land that dwarfs everything – as though Hyrule really sits at the bottom of some giant hole. Land that you are so far below but can still see the plains on top of? Sailing down towards the respawn triggers. Then, suddenly, I found a spot to land.”

“A what?”

“It’s cut 6 feet into the actual side of the cliff. There’s nothing along there but some thin snow to follow. Tony, this strip goes on for miles, and it’s so far down there that the game itself loses track of where you are, respawns you into the wrong place if you reload. A space that feels, in many ways, unknown to the actual developers, as if their sculpting tech randomly carved this out and no developer ever bothered to really check what went on down there. It was there that I stood and felt his presence.”

“As for where he went from there?”

“He finally felt ready to write some kind of grand manifesto. But he never wrote it and, once this had sunken it, he felt that his blog was no longer him. Two: He’s Australian – his distance from America and Japan gave him the edge he needed to approach the art as an outsider.”

“And then Hollow Knight.”

“Exactly.”

“So he compensated by stepping back, disappearing from the industry entirely.”

“Three: Or he simply started making his own god damn game. The “internet discussion” aspect fell beneath him in the process. He’s now a man who speaks through the fun you have while playing his masterpiece. Four. There came a day where he realized everything he immersed himself in was now pointing in a single, rather serious direction. Something had crept into the very pillars below video games, video game reviews and video game forum posts. That thing was war.”

The Fighting Grave of Yakuza 0

… they call themselves weebs. I’m okay with that. The anime – all good. The sterile JRPG game environment – they have assumed it as something not needing to ever be thrown out or changed. I’m about to tell you just how Yakuza 0 has failed the “sterile” JRPG game environment… how the weebs should draw a line at this point. The truth is that the old-school turn-based battle system and how it has been placed in old-school video game products is very good, if never remembered for the simple beauty. This very ungame-y experience it was – literally just walking around a world of no gameplay. How sterile, nobody ever said. And then, with great fanfare and eye-melting effect (the game was telling you, “don’t be alarmed, I really really want this thing happen with my fabric,”) that stuff literally dissolved away. Left in its wake was something completely different. It was a different place… it had its own rules. Only a player’s imagination linked these two – that is, linked the disappeared with the actively present. You were now controlling the arrow or the selective underline or the selective box on an interface, the character-you-had-been-previously-controlling’s image resembling its map-traversal self but, too, a separate 3D model and it was then, also, just an NPC or some sort of never-admitted-as-being one “choose your own adventure” movie character following the interface’s commands in many dexterous and gymnastic ways which were completely free of the interface’s ruling. You couldn’t move Cloud in such a way, you couldn’t meta-command Cloud on how to precisely follow the instructionally-limited two word long command to do it – any attack that you/the interface ordered. (The model had this freedom from you both, to an extent. It had its own soul, at least.) It was sneaky and clever and lovely, this back-and-forth transition (or should I say, non-transition. My “imagination” was all that linked or blurred the two products together, in actual fact, as I’ve said). And it fooled me into accepting the “Walk Around Gameplayless Map” part, more than that, fooled me into thinking I was, exclusively doing so there, directly partaking in the same “narrative action” of that interface gameplay (with that direct control of Cloud). D-pad to move. The truth was right there all along. There were no foes in “D-pad to move” Cloud’s map.

I don’t want modern JRPG’s to dial back on the transitions (or fooling non-transitions) and I don’t want Yakuza 0 to give me control over a supposed single 3D model entity who is, literally, made up of two different entities. It cancels all the fun out. You don’t go to other places, better places, with such a setup. Map Traversing Ryu, who can’t do anything but run, collect inventory items and talk to NPC’s. Street Fighter Ryu, who doesn’t do any of the former beyond running (well, of course he may run in both, so what?) – takes on an otherwise 100% different animation set, for God’s sake, to Map Traversal’s.

One’s animations – these always run on repeated loops, they tap the occult principal of rhythm. All function with their own rhythms. Change the animations entirely, look sonny, it “disappears” the entity, buries it under the otherwise unchanged 3D model (now possessed by a new game, a new entity, a new place that cries for more).

It’s why it’s so fitting that in most other games, when a massive shift-over in entity happens, you actually enter a special, powered-up suit or vehicle… or the new entity is the same “character” as the first entity but is now armless, or younger, or powered-up – in other words, the 3D model itself is changed. The person is changed. There’s a sense of no going back, at least, without another physical change. This isn’t afforded to Combat Ryu by his sticked-on fire/glow effect.

The fire/glow in combat mode begins a few seconds too late. The optimum time for it to happen is during those little “duck goon’s swing, enter stance,” cutscenes. Ready, Set, Go. The fire is only coming in after Go. If the fire were a “tangible” thing that Ryu needed to activate so he “would” fight – say that it’s his “fighting power” or something, his capacity to even move like that, never mind the damage output level – if this fire was to serve as the “missing link” between the two Ryus then it would be “intentionally activated” by the man himself to an extent (he wouldn’t be required to be literally “activating the fire effect” as if he were a player activating his Demon Dante but he would need to show some sort of *click* moment, some sort of internal change, the fire being a kind of unmentioned side-effect) by Ryu in-cutscene (sort of DBZ style) when he would be getting ready to fight. What actually happens is that… when it appears, well, it’s just there when the fight has started. Ryu’s Ready, Set, Go! is out of sync with it, or rather, is lacking it. When you swap styles and the fire changes colour, that’s done with the right timing but that wins no points. No developer would ever make the mistake of putting that particular change out of sync as the “change” is tied to a button press, reporter.

The fire is superfluous and unexplained, really, just as jarring as that break of consistency in everything else. A visual reminder of the void between Map Traversal Ryu and Combat Ryu in the first place, ironically trying to bridge it. In other combat gameplay in other games, this kind of “Combat Ability being unlocked by the character’s activated Power Mode” thing is available to be there, note, for the “whole of their game.”  (… another reason why the style-swapping in Yakuza 0 doesn’t especially bother me, reporter, or rather, only bothers me insofar as that it’s a part of the collection of things that separates Map Traversal Ryu from Combat Ryu; it doesn’t bother me how it is available-at-all-times within its whole, self-contained, [wrongly self-contained – but still successfully self-contained, as far as that goes] package.)

Just avoid the whole JRPG Sterile Environment thing altogether, developer. Let the player “switch” not just between the different colour fires at will, when there’s fire – let the player have control over when they should switch between “fire” and “not fire.” Boom. Ryu is complete as a videogame character. Everyting is there for the whole game. Keep the “Ready Set Go” cutscene for fight-zone set up purposes –  for sneaking in, off-camera, the cheering peds who act as edges of the ring.

Now, lastly, the worst part. There are these  goons who run at you in the map. They see your Map Traversal Ryu and run at him. They are not making movements towards your Map Traversal Man because they want to engage in some sort of way with Map Traversal Man. They want to “disappear” him; when that “combat encounter they’re wanting to trigger” kicks off, they’ve already done their job, that’s why the fights as Combat Ryu with them – why the victories over them – are unsatisfying to me. They’ve dominated and snuffed, out of existence, Map Traversal Ryu before even delivering their supposed first attack upon Map Traversal Ryu – because Map Traversal Ryu is not who they punch, that Ryu experiences his last moments of “life” as their prey with no way to defend himself from those thugs.

2 Years Later

No, I do remember Yakuza 0. I haven’t revisited any game, in fact. I find that it’s easier to “feel that you know them” by “proving this to yourself” by “remembering them,” continuing the sense of fulfillment (the belief you’d properly “absorbed” the abstract lesson or, perhaps – even more abstract – the brain-juice mental transference/download the game had in mind for you to take from itself) that motivated you to stop playing a game in the first place, to move on. This false confidence that is memory – that you, back then, did not only have the comprehensive experience but absorbed it. That a video game experience is a long-term consumption. I prefer this to opening up the new can of worms which is not supposed to be “new.”

So, I remember Yakuza 0. I remember you. I remember the conversation we shared at my old house (which I remember fondly). You see, Reporter, you better not have rung that place up while you were tracking me down. Oh? You were just trying to get back in contact with me and weren’t updated w/r/t the contact details? Alright, very casual – whatever. But I know what time of night you were doing it. Late, roughly. There’s this family of six living there now, reporter. Remember the people with families. There’s a whole world out there. I’m serious. No, I am.

…

Is that The Strange Video Game Reporter who I’m talking  to? That doesn’t sound like you, mate.

…

I’m not of either walk of life, I was never one of the weebs, those weebs… look, there’s minor crossover with these JRPGs. And I don’t know JRPG’s too well, reporter. I don’t really know if  – what did I name it? The Hard Wipes. The Spirals. The Checkerboard Fill-ins. If the “transitions” were, mentally, so full-proof, all-round. I spoke as if FF7 represented them all (transitions), as if there wasn’t an art to it but simple steps.

…

So what’s this mod? Show me. I’m ready to see a modded Yakuza 0, the first version of the game I’ve seen in two years.

…

Oh.

…

Let’s break the game and see how far we can make it through, then. But. Swapping combat Ryu around with… what did I call it, Map Traversal Ryu… I mean, sure, the game plays out in an interesting way because you’re in combat mode when there’s no combat and in unfired-running-mode when your goal is not map-traversal but defeating some surrounding foes. I believe we can just run and bug out of this space, though. Squeeze past the cheering pedestrians. Going past pedestrians is, after all, what Map Traversal Ryu is absolutely required by the game to be able to do.

…

And, seemingly,  you’re not just stuck inappropriately running around the game with the combat music still playing and with the score system active and the goons permanently locked in stance position, moving nudge by nudge. Crossing the space puts you back in fight-stance mode.

…

This mod – it’s all novel, yes, but… we know what this is really about, don’t we? The two… what rightfully should have been two places and two entities being catastrophically collapsed into one, not separable enough, in this form of the tragedy or the other, broken apart not even by modding.

12 Hours Later

I know, now, why you so badly wanted me to pay Chrono Trigger. And I’d told you about how I wasn’t too knowledgeable about JRPG’s. How much more exposed I am, having never played Chrono Trigger until… until this is all far too late. And you’re still speaking to me, inquiring. I wonder if this will work out for you like you hope it will. Very well. Maintaining a philosophy, I thought – seeing Chrono Trigger – that it was the unproblematic collapse of two seperate places/entities. It relieved me, reporter. See the relief. It gave me the solution to Yakuza 0, to the problem not of the game itself (that game is always going to be a problem) but to the problem of a game featuring a “collapse,” so catastrophically, of coming away from that as a noticer. A kind of distrust opened up for the medium at large.

…

Anybody who knows JRPGs will know how Chrono Trigger achieves this. Monsters – same models as in combat, too – actually present in the overworld. I can’t even call it a “map” anymore because of that. Everywhere where there’s foes is not just the the world’s “setting representation,” now, it IS in fact the world. What is missing from it? Nothing. More examples that are too obvious and too universally praised, Reporter. My work here is just about complete – it has to be.

…

Well let me know when you find something else.”

The Crackpot

Gaming studios are being infiltrated. It’s widespread and it’s a massive scare. Word from some of our best working directors claims that they’re into Neo-Pythagorean thought. The infiltrators want to put their geometry into the polygonal form. They want players to project themselves into their math. One of the directors is actively advertising via encoded message on his company’s web page to be infiltrated. Nobody knows where they came from, what their end-game is, if they’re capable or genius. If we are dealing with people that are just too smart to get such a job normally. Hot tip: That leak of that Egypt Assasin’s Creed game was done by a worried dev. He was tipping off all the outside-Ubisoft devs that his Ancient Egypt-based game was likely a target of the Pythagoreans. It was a signal for backup. They say a famous inventor of some sort invented video games; one of the big ones. Didn’t actually make one, but sketched it out, got a decent grant, made a team but it got moved to a bigger and more important project, the idea floated. Who says that? I won’t tell you who said that, but I think you can figure it out. Just kidding, this person isn’t in the public spotlight. And he’s dead. Old age.

Video games. They’ve been around since WW2, specifically within the inner circles of the allies but someone brought them to the public. Games are Japan’s greatest nuclear retaliation, Space Invaders is, like, 40 years older than what they say it is. Hitler overreacted to the intel he had on our games and thought we had something much more threatening, he thought we had lasers in outer space, that’s a laugh. Recovered from the UFO (not the Roswell UFO, something massive and civilian and with recreational facilities); this was a title unknown, and much better than Space Invaders from what I hear; from beings that were (due to being so advanced) more comfortable with mentally projecting themselves into a digital plain than we. It was 3D, the game, they never even started with 2D. Hideo Kojima said that. What I suspect might in fact be going on is that the misinformation-churner of the Deep State has overshot the mark a bit and made misinformation – a bunch of silly crap – for things that don’t need it – i.e. videogames. Unless they’re more important than we realise. Maybe they are. Maybe video games are as ancient, on Earth, as Atlantis. Everywhere is fucked, really. The allies kept a lid on video games because they didn’t understand them. The pilots who played them believed they were the only ones entitled to them.

~~~~~~

Buy a Nintendo Console? You have to get all their games for it. That’s just how it works. I feel like I have to buy Mario Kart 8 Deluxe out-of-obligation. Like, they released the Nes Mini last Christmas. It came with all the Nintendo NES games packaged onto it. As if they’re inseparable. One with the console. It was nothing but Nintendo propaganda. That’s why they’re not restocking it even though there’s demand for more stock. It did its job. It spread the idea.

like, they

The Strange Reporter Returns: Part 1

It’s the developers who go through crunch and come out capable of intense human feeling who are truly capable, who, at the end of the day, still have something left for the world. For this planet Earth. They choose not to forget that it looked after their minds before the technology did, and they claim their place. They look after technology rather than submit to it; they’re higher up as things. And I won’t go into who this person is or why he felt this particular way about me, but he expressed his fondness of me, to me, by sharing his news about Pokemon and Zelda. “If you think you know yourself now, wait until I tell you about Pokemon Go.” Big smile on his face. Believed himself to be Father Christmas. Actually believed in, and followed, the myth. He got me out on the street and then pretended I was playing Go. The nature of the game made him sound sort of unfortunately half-mad (from his narration of my playing Pokemon Go, I was then predicting the “Pokemon = willed-into-existence-spiritual-entities” conspiracies which were to come). He simulated the experience. He pointed, like with his fingers, and he spoke. He raved. He only cared for Pokemon and Zelda.

So, Go. I was waiting, in public, one hour prior to when its servers went live. I was at a PokeGym, one disclosed to me by this very same man, who’d done the digging for me. My enthusiasm is what kept him doing this but the truth is I was using him to indulge a curiosity. I was loitering, I was in fact waiting for people to turn up. I cared. Listen, I did care about Pokemon Go. This was the ultimate present from that man to me: nobody who was there understood the area in that extra Pokemon-Go way but I did; I’d thought it out, forseen the future. I got to witness that change in the place’s context from above.

It’s chilly and I’m out seeking Pokemon Go players, Reporter. They are what makes the app worth it after all. That’s what was ultimately uncovered. I’m seeking the lifeblood of the game. A game which uses people as its personal ghosts. A game which put the gamers into this world.

And you’ve come, almost out of thin air, Strange Reporter, and found me, walked up and introduced yourself but do you still have the app on you? Did you pull yourself together? Word was that Pokemon Go – of all things – ended you, sent you into a comma. Your sources; they all lost their minds and you went off the deep end with them. You couldn’t report on what was happening. This is what I’d been led to believe by the ones who stayed grounded and sane. The industry suffered a very private existential crisis but it eventually resolved itself but what about your lot, who don’t forget anything? The industry doesn’t appreciate you. I’m going to make a good game. Not a phone app thing. A real game. Are you even interested in that? What, pray, made you come here, you disgusting man? So I’m going to give you the heads up. Jot this down. Or, don’t believe it. The simple reality was that Pokemon Go wasn’t a game, but, for the sake of experimenting, we all believed it was. The results were confusing and I’m sorry for what it did to you. But Zelda will put you back in action, that’s the one which will be a positive veer. And Zelda, it turns out, holds the key to understanding Pokemon Go, Reporter. What makes it even seem like a game. Everything that’s game-like about it. Ocarina of Time, yes, it’s all there – why wouldn’t it be? Stop hanging out with Sony’s game-makers. They’re not healthy people.

It comes down the to gameplay mechanics of Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go claimed your walking as its gameplay; it added a necessary ingredient to make it gameplay and not just a thing you had to do between your catching, battling, things I don’t think I have to explain to you. In others words, here provided-for-you is what made that walking into actual Gameplay and not just a kind of real-life loading screen. I couldn’t bring myself to follow the Pokemon Go players who were in that inbetween state. Looking at the app’s map was something you had to do, but when and where and how often you did that was up to you, and that was the freedom that made this all gameplay, at least, it was step 1.

Seeing something new on the map – a new pokestop, was the reward for doing it well. Not actually getting there. And, not seeing anything new on the map after you pulled it out to check, that felt like a failure, an irritating wasting of effort and time. Everyone figured out the perfect moment to pull out their phones mid-walk by observing the boundaries of the map, figuring out where they were, when they entered new space. That’s what the real game was. It was an orienteering experience. Seeing things differently. Now we’re getting to the fun part where we’re asking, “Do I pull out my phone and look at the map while walking? Perhaps I might I stop somewhere instead. I’ll be stopping somewhere, Reporter, to do something that’s crucial to my Pokemon-Go playing which has nothing to do with any of Pokemon Go’s actual programmed-in catching or battling or shopping or anything else the app claims to be its immediate reasons for looking at it. It assumes this will happen rather than expects. Should I do it on this sidewalk with folks passing by or do I get to that nice open public lawn over there and do it then?”

The Dev and the Director

The director ordered us – his own team – to ask him questions that would prove destructive to his career. It was the middle of crunch and our game was average under all examination. He wanted to see our project be put into more danger because he mistrusted caffeine, instead harnessed the adrenaline caused by his impending failure. He made bad games so he’d be able to work through crunch. So I asked, “What if people understand how to play it but don’t understand the fun that ought to come out of it?” And he listened. And it killed the project. And now I’ll now explain it all to you, Strange Video Game Reporter.

You did a sneaky article on Rockstar employees. They analyzed Uncharted 4 and we as readers encountered the man that struggled to “get” the great game he nevertheless knew how to play. I, too, had to overcome such a personal difficulty when it rose up in my encounter with Dark Souls 3.

And now the unpacking begins. I’m sure you’ll recall the difference between the “block” action and the “roll action,” the methods of avoiding damage. Let’s say I asked the director, “What if they understand the controls of the game but play it in way that isn’t very fun? What if they basically don’t know any better because the game doesn’t punish them for playing it oddly? Then they never feel in-tune.”

I rolled too much in Dark Souls 3. I let men convince me to roll. The game was ill-equipped for minds tuned this way. Miyazaki could have intuited this. I rolled away from around two thirds of the total number of attacks. It informed my idea of the gameplay, my idea of the character and his relationship with the world which he seemed to live in by dodging.

Our game got delayed because our director told us to figure out what the game was. The truth is that the majority of games feel foggy about the topic of what their experience is. He didn’t need to do that.

Hence the emphasis on gameplay-less set pieces. They give the demo-ers something they can point at, basically saying, “Hello everyone. Here is a part of our game that we understand completely.”

There’s always abstract moments in today’s weird, complicated games wherein it doesn’t matter if you whip out one of your many in-game mechanics and/or actions. Put on Assasin’s Creed and try running around in circles as often as you can, see how oblivious the game is to it, feel lonely even inside the game.

Dark Souls 3 is interesting. Running around in circles? That’s totally home-free but only when you’re safe. You feel the game starting to hone in on it when in combat mode. Judging absolutely everything you do. Out of combat, though, this is what the game is thinking: “The player’s current running-in-circles motion will become discipline-able when I want it to, but for now the player is able to do this while feeling safe.” Those raggy corpses that are fun to run into (not to mention the mostly pointless but fun pottery) could be a clue to the game’s personality. Being able to mess around with that junk at all is the game’s idea of a gift. There is a warm intelligence behind it.  The game understands that it sucks, not being “allowed” to do that stuff. It’s why doing it sometimes genuinely adds something to the game, why pot-smashing isn’t as unnecessary to game and its goals as the act first seems. It’s also not a coincidence that people prefer rolling into pots over smashing them with weapons.

The rolling is supposed to be unideal in combat. And it literally is. Rolling locks you into an animation, wastes your stamina, unpredictably shifts your footing and blocking stuns enemies – all you have to do is let them hit you w/a raised shield. The combat is mainly L1 and R1. The blocking is actually designed to feel like attacking. The rolling is for emergencies, panic, being on a state of lower-than-ideal ground. It’s Bloodborne’s fault and maybe it’s the “You Will Be Frustrated,” marketing’s fault, too, that so many people see Souls in a tainted light convincing them to over-use the frustrating roll button.

Why mostly-blocking in Souls doesn’t make the games worse:

1. You spend dangerous amounts of time in front of enemies, waiting for them to perform moves that are good to block.

2. Raising your shield slows stamina re-generation. You stress over whether or not you want to stand in front of an enemy openly (!) in order to regenerate your stanima. Then you have to figure out what to do if when you make yourself open. Do you backspace, potentially worsening your position in terms of being able to kill the enemy?

And the people who prefer to roll all the time baffle me. I think this is what they fail to understand: Connecting the box of your shield with the arc of an enemy attack is one of the game’s main skills. Do they know it’s a skill at all? They might only know that swinging a sword without missing is.

Our director had no idea if some our game’s skills were really skills. One day, he saw our player-character climb up a ledge and he asked us if we could turn that into 30% of the game, if we couldn’t, he wanted it cut.

Good Dark Souls 3 gameplay has to do with getting “hit” by enemy attacks as much as it has to do with not getting hit, my friend. When you understand this – when you use defense offensively – the fighting increases in variety by roughly 100%. There’s the player deciding which attacks are connectable and which ought not to be. So much extra observation and thought. The player manifesting each of these judgments into Dark Souls 3 meaningfully with either the use or the dissuse of the L1 button, the player feeling that more is happening in the game that is sourced from his own mind. Even though what’s happening on-screen is the exact same as before.

The Sony Leaker

SVGR, this is right up your alley. Last night there was a pitch. All under wraps. Lord knows if it will ever emerge.

I went.

The man pitching – he wasn’t from Sony Computer Entertainment. Try and think big.

Get a load of this.

“This isn’t just any controller, gentlemen. Third parties did this. Look at the transparent casing – we convinced the world this was cheap, garbage. They’ve approached the market differently since.”

He was holding up one of these:

 

“Because we taught players to know controllers 100% as their outside. The buttons, the sticks, the overall structure that fitted in their hands; exactly all they needed to know. Showing the innards was pointless. A gimmick.

But this is where the controller needs to go – inward. In a meaningful way. I’m not sure how, exactly, or even why. As required when it comes to revolutionary ideas, we must think of our controllers as being part of a family of bodies, make everyone’s minds go into these bodies at once. This will effect phones, television remotes, computers. Us that begins it, as it is meant to be. Only stuff like the cheap Dualshock or the Gameboy Colour have dared to show off the chips of a device and one day we will look back and understand why.

I got this controller in the mid-90’s. Back then, I had time to play videogames. Now I have only enough to pick up a controller and fiddle for fifteen seconds. As a kid, this thing had always been surreal to me because up to that point I’d always felt that Sony gamepads were empty or hollow, and somehow I still saw the new Mad Catz controller as hollow in essence despite stuff visibly rattling around inside the shell. That’s because the bottoms of the handles were still  hollow and they spread that theme to the rest of the casing.

Here’s the second transparent controller I received for my PS1. Notice they’ve filled the handles with a bunch of crap – lights, vibration motors – and can still be sensed as being hollow. This is not what we are going to do.”

After this, some sort of ultra-high level Sony body stood up from his seat and approached the speaker. The two entered a private room. Everyone else got sent out.

Take care, SVGR.

 

The Naughty Dog and Rockstar Connection

Reporter! They did it. For once they turned up and talked, as you said, about something videogame related and something really damn complicated at that. I didn’t believe you when you said they made video games. Anyhow!

[Bloke raises his pint.] “This goes out to the directors at Naughty Dog who I imagine are wielding only the simplest creative instruments at this moment – pens and notebooks. Journals kept next to their beds. They’re excited, being able to sleep long enough to have dreams again.”

[Other bloke interrupts.] “And I bet they’re allowing themselves time to go through all the shitty forums.”

[Main speaker continues.] “They’ve become a little like the buyers, haven’t they? ”

“They’ve left the fox hole. The shit hole. The cunt. They can be seen again by the light. And what they’re getting now is a sense of their company’s future. From its projected image, that is, the glow it has on the internet, not from the office. Where should Naughty Dog go next? What it should do with its ground-breaking craft? Only now can they ask questions we ask all the time, outside.”

“Running out of time to stay in this moment, aren’t they? Well, what can these bastards learn when Uncharted 4’s feedback is a hot, stinking mess? Seven factions of Uncharted 4 opinion, putting it briefly.”

“Neil’s too young to look away from the opinions.”

“The combat is loved. I do have a point coming. Let’s look at the no-fighting bits.”

“That caused the directors the most anxiety.”

“Called everything from “walking simulators,” to, “slow-paced action sequences,” to “great pace-setters which give the game more of a cinematic feel and give the gunfights build-up, some actual narrative weight.” It turns out that the game’s simplest parts are the most ambiguous.”

“Because they did something new, didn’t they? Funny that nobody has accused us of making walking simulators. We know what people actually do in them.”

“That’s because nobody walks around, doing nothing in $$$ unless they’ve decided they want to do that, and they get to stop whenever the feeling finishes for them. In Uncharted 4 I’ve felt every emotion that Neil and Bruce have recorded in their journals and predicted and feared. I’ve been bored and  entertained by Nate jogging and climbing for what I can only say feels like an extraordinarily brave amount of time.”

“Arguably a heroic amount of time, for a linear shooting game.”

“I’ve never been quite so aware of a game being its developer’s performance. Playing Uncharted 4, I feel like I’m watching Naughty Dog doing stuff on an actual stage. This is because Naughty Dog has done something it’s never done before; they’ve put out a game for an old IP after inventing a new one and, even worse, they have brought significant parts the new IP into the old one. Uncharted and the Last of Us are now bonded… in spirit.”

“Naughty Dog is now exposed like never before as being the product.”

“It’s not that I get mood swings about the slow bits, I was bored then in joy. This was an actual progression. I actually understand how to change your mental penetration of Uncharted 4 so that the “slow bits,” give you a good time even if you’ve already played them recently and reckon it might take time for you to forget them so they’re tolerable again.”

“Okay.”

“It wasn’t easy, learning how to do that. I don’t think Naughty Dog gave players the branch they needed to swing onto where I am, this what-might-as-well-be-called altered consciousness. What I’m saying is that I love Uncharted 4 but it asks a lot of you.”

“What did you do?”

“After beating the game, the first thing I did was head back to Madagascar. I wanted to drive the jeep around there again but I didn’t plan on what I would do. I had to do something different, though, didn’t I?  I was lacking that initial sense of the unknown this time. So I ended up driving wherever I felt like. Then I got out of the jeep and jogged as far away from it as I could, to nowhere in particular.”

“Which would basically end your involvement with the narrative’s scene whether or not the game thought you were still there, wouldn’t it? It’d be like if Franklin got out of Lamar’s car and then went to another block and it turned out we didn’t program in a telephone call from Lamar saying get back here dick head.”

“I looked down at the mud, I tried to shoot birds. I got bored. You know things are bleak when Drake hasn’t spoken in a while.”

“That’d feel really creepy.”

“It felt like an immature mindset. Yes it did. I knew there was something in Uncharted 4 that I had yet to enter, something I’d only felt glimpses of in the first playthrough. I went directly to a few combat encounters, faced a gauntlet the game hadn’t thrown at me on its own terms, this time playing on Hard – fun, but not it. I checked out the islands again, got melancholic very quickly. My own playing was throwing me curveballs. It felt like Half a Red Dead game.”

“Well, it was. We have to look like Madagascar – Sam said it! He got footage of it long before any journalist.”

“I started a new game on Hard. I got to the start of Chatper 3 and this is where the game began to… change… around me. What changed was that I began to care about finding the little treasures.”

“I thought you were telling a story that was at least work-level complex.”

“Shoosh. I began to care about everything they did with the game design because completing the task was not just about finding twinkling gold dots. You had to find the world, first. You had to learn, for the first time, that there was a game world somewhere on the screen that you had to watch and map-out, vaguely, in your head. Otherwise you were blind to the places where the treasure was.”

“Suggesting what the players were missing was a sense that there was a game world at all? I suppose this is true if they don’t pay attention to the treasures, follow only the mandatory path and never see quite where everything gives way to the background, the no-player space, the no man’s land.”

“At the start of the auction chapter it began to hit me. What the bored Uncharted 4 players do is get through the slow sections. And the joyful Uncharted 4 players hang out in them. In Uncharted 4 I chill out on rooftops, alleways, car parks, gardens and this is just in Chapter 6. And the reason why it’s so fun to just be in these places is very similar to why it’s easy to do the same thing in our very own GTAV. The gigantic differences between the two are, in fact, meaningless compared to what they have in common.”

“You should send Neil an email. Naughty Dog wouldn’t have a clue about, what, how to prompt their players into enjoying the slow world-y sections – like you’ve just described -using their GTA or Red Dead skills.”

“Well it’s tricky with Uncharted.”

“They just have to tell players, “Hunt the hidden treasures.”

“They do that! By definition, though, the treasures are a tacky side thing and don’t even deserve the emphasis. Because in Uncharted, being incredibly aware of the game space isn’t important. Ideally, Naughty Dog blurs your feeling of what’s game-world and what is no man’s land.”

“That’s not ideal, though. You just explained why that’s not ideal.”

“I know. Naughty Dog are stupid, okay.”

“Uncharted doesn’t work.”

“Not as well as it should.”

“So you, then, figuring it all out for yourself..”

“Yeah, that was my brain basically cheating on behalf of the game, for the game, the game with its deep weaknesses and paradoxes. And I have nothing more to say.”

 

Hope it was worth the wait.

Best Regards, ya weirdo,

Bill.

 

 

 

 

An Off-Beat Mt Chilliad Mystery Theory

I’m sending this to you, my fellow strange player, because I do not have the time to get 100% anymore and I trust that you’d use this idea better than most, maybe you could even solve the mystery if you stopped chasing your “loop” theory. Anyway.

There is a mechanic in GTAV that is flying over everybody’s heads.

When the player does nothing for long enough, the game enters a “screensaver” state. Back in the last-gen versions, this would be the only way to get into first-person. I’ve always privately felt that this is very meaningful to the game and its themes.

Long after all missions have been completed, on the map there will still feature many icons signifying activities, right, activities that are supposed to bring the characters leisure, relaxation, entertainment, adrenaline and stimulation. These are the tennis, yoga, movie-watching and parachuting activities. Now, obviously this is the sort of shit Trevor, Michael and Franklin are going to be doing day-in and day-out once they’ve “finished the game,” gotten rich and retired. They need these activities to help dull the hollow-feeling pain they feel inside as they continue to live their lives. Many of these activities exist in real life to do this for real people. They serve as a kind of unsatisfying epilogue. Everybody has retired to play golf.

How do the characters.players actually begin to do these activities? Well, the minigame-launchers are “over there,” right, on some part of the map, so the way to begin these minigames is to get moving towards their icons. The game is always encouraging you to move somewhere. This is my point. It accomplishes this by using the map and its icons, these are very important. Every one of these waypoints/activities/missions are things that the characters have motive in pursuing, but purely because they are hoped to cure the characters’ hollow-feeling pain. I’m no longer talking about just the minigames but also the story missions because they are part of “climbing the pyramid,” “getting rich quick” and all the other deeply unsatisfying things the characters seek in the game. We talk about the three characters and their spiritual paths a lot here (now might be the time to mention that this was originally posted on the Chilliad Mystery reddit page). We seek to put the players on “correct” spiritual paths, we think this might unlock the easter egg. Movement itself is a kind of dark misdirection in GTAV because literally every meaningful place the game allows you to move to is not going to help your character inside and that’s all part of the game’s deeper satire. The game is telling you that there is nothing worthwhile in it to actively pursue, yet spends most of its time telling you to pursue X location, or even set your own X location in a spot that won’t even trigger a mission. The joke gets taken to a new level when Michael has to run around the desert for Epsilon, a fake spiritual organisation, with no set final destination, without an X. All you have to do to accomplish the unsatisfying task here is move. Do you see what the game is telling us?

Now let’s take this to another level. When playing GTA, we either move the character somewhere because the character has motive (albeit misguided motive) to go there, or because we’re sandboxing and we genuinely feel it’d be entertaining to move there for whatever reason (we’re playing this in the first place to be entertained, after all). “There” can mean Mt Chilliad, it can mean the road in front of you, it can mean the space around the car you want to steal or the wall you want to take cover behind. Recall this dialogue right at the beginning of the game: “All he does is jerk off and play that fucking game.” Playing and running around in GTAV is your misdirection, it’s an activity you do to dull the pain, and Rockstar knows it. They feel sort of guilty about it. You and your character? You’re more alike than you know. You both associate emotional nourishment with, literally, moving around the map. The player literally has to move around the map to use the game. Michael, Trevor and Franklin literally have to move around the map to progress through the spiritually misguided events of their own life story. But if you stop moving completely in GTAV, you literally just… go within. Into first person, I mean. But you have to consciously not move or do anything at all. And it’s like the game rewards you for this in a weird little way…

The symbol at the top of the mural = a still analogue stick. The “sun rays” (it makes no sense they’d be below a horizon line, and we currently think it’s a horizon line) are actually tongue-in-cheek, cartoon lines that communicate that the analogue stick is being left alone by your thumb and that there is now a bit of space around it. The horizontal line that goes through the middle of the stick and the vertical line that drops down from the centre symbolise the stick being in a state of perfect balance.

Note that the symbol is clearly “above” (i.e, removed from and superior to) a map with X’s on it.”