This Right Here (The Last of Us Part 2)

Just a comment that today's Penny Arcade precisely encapsulates why I haven't picked up The Last of Us Part 2 yet:

I feel bad for Naughty Dog. I bet it's an amazing game, but The Last of Us Part 2 was delayed several times, and I am sure they need to get it released before the next console generation comes crashing in, but this is precisely the kind of game I don't really want to play right now. It's not even a "horror" thing....it's the fact that this is a sequel to one of the most emotionally intense, depressing and miserable games of the last console generation, and the state of the nation (and world) right now just doesn't lend much room to voluntary misery.

Also, it probably doesn't help that we should all suspect a "TLOU2" remaster next year on the PS5. Just saying!

Penny Arcade and Acquisitions Incorporated doing an official D&D Setting with WotC

Well this is interesting. Also, the cartoon which as usual is poignant and funny:

This is an intersection of the hobby today that I know nothing about, so I don't know what it means to have Tycho (Jerry Krahulik iirc) authoring a book via Acquisitions Incorporated as an official D&D product through WotC. I mean, I know what the last part means...the unannounced new setting is clearly this thing, whatever it is. But I haven't really got a clue what the setting is, or why it is, other than that the Penny Arcade comics have been a consistent source of amusement for me for twenty years now, something few other online comics have held up to over time. And as far as I know Acquisitions Incorporated is...I think...a youtube channel or something where people dress up and play D&D? Or maybe they do it at the PAX conventions that I'd love to attend someday? I am not sure and their website is surprisingly ugly. I don't have the time to go down that rabbit hole these days so I guess I'll just let some future setting book surprise me completely. Kind of like how Ravnica got to be a new thing for me since I know nothing of Magic after about 1995.

I guess we'll know later this year!

Penny Arcade on Parenting

It's nice having a kid now, even if I'm a few years behind the curve because it means I have a better context of understanding for things like this and this over at Penny Arcade. Tycho and Gabe (author cyphers for Mike and Jerry, the real dudes behind PA) ponder the horrifying realities of child rearing in the age of the internet and Xbox Live Chat, and Gabe in particular suffers a meltdown about a little girl who loves Slenderman.

This touches on several interesting phenomena that I have noticed, both as one of the unfettered and one of the very-much-fettered parents...and I have no doubt as the years creep by my perceptions will shift even more, suffer greater challenges, and ultimately go through a process of metamorphosis into something entirely different from what I can conceive of right now.

Chief among those phenomena is the problem of "me as a parent" and "all those other people who are bad parents." It's a real thing, and I bet anyone with kids has noticed it from both sides: what you are doing as a parent, and what you know must be done as a parent is inevitably different from what other people are doing as parents, and more importantly what you think people should be doing as parents. You've probably scrutinized other parents....but just as likely, and with an equal level of bravado I bet at some point you've had to defend your own parenting actions from other parents (or in my wife's case our own parents, alias grandma and grandpa).

When I was about eight years old my dad took me to see Alien. My sister was along for the ride, too iirc, and that means she was about 6. The lasting effect of this discovery was that I developed a deep and profound interest in the horror genre later on in life, and an unaccountably obsessive interest in all things both horror and science fiction. It was mind expanding for me, even as I sat through the horrible bits of the movie, but it was worth it. My dad probably just wanted to see a good sci fi movie and lacking any easy sitting options (we lived in a very rural area so visits to the city were infrequent) decided that it was worth seeing. Plus, and it's easy to forget this, there had up to that point been nothing even remotely like Alien on the big screen by 1978. Gruesome horror films...Hammer horror? Sure! But a big budget, well conceived, thoughtfully designed and executed SF film that also grappled with fear, terror, horrific imagery and still managed to make a cogent, smart story out of all of it? That was a rarity. If anything, seeing that horror film first made it simultaneously a much more difficult quest for me later on to find and enjoy other horror films because so many paled in comparison. I had the bar set high at a very early age, and as a result my subsequent obsession for such films as I got older was difficult to overcome.

So it is with this memory of my own experience in mind that I read the Penny Arcade cartoon with great amusement, because I've played the key Slenderman game (the one where you find these sheets of paper scattered around while trying to stay away from Slenderman) and it's frankly no worse an experience (and perhaps even slightly better) than Alien was to me at eight years of age. This isn't necessarily the sort of thing I feel a child needs to be sheltered from. If you seek to pad your child from all negative emotions, experiences or life lessons then you will create a child who lives in a bubble of deceit, and I don't want that for my kid.

Conversely, it is entirely possible that the little girl in the cartoon (who is apparently derived from an actual recent incident) is strictly allowed access to limited entertainment, and that the parents have deemed Slenderman acceptable by virtue of the fact that it contains only fear, and no gore, violence, nudity or other features that are far more typical of the horror genre. As I see it, shielding your child from this game is a bit like trying to shield your child from the evocation of fear entirely....and that's impossible. Not to mention, you're missing an opportunity to let your child explore such feelings in a safe environment, rather than get hit all at once by it in some moment of real tragedy or loss. Learning isn't always just about the good stuff.

When Alien came out it was a terrifying movie to me, but I loved it all the same. My dad bought me the alien action figure (the one which was shortly thereafter pulled from shelves due to complaints by various parent groups) along with the Metal Hurlant-produced graphic novel. It was great catharsis for me, something I could enjoy and escape into, to reflect upon the morbidity of a dark future with alien hunters and survivors, and something I needed as a child. Why? When I saw Alien it was in a world that was being bombarded by real, terrible fear constantly. I was growing up in a world at the height of the Cold War, and I regularly had nightmares and waking imaginings of nuclear war destroying everything. I was morbidly fascinated at the reality I was living in, one which appeared to be capable of being wiped out at any moment due to forces far beyond my ready understanding as a kid. Alien was a sort of fear I could deal with, it was more tangible, and also something I fully understood was imaginary. Adults do not seem to give kids enough credit for an ability to parse out the real from the imagined. It's a big problem, really, in today's modern culture, saturated with people who prefer to look to media influence as the cause of all problems and not their own ignorance.

Then again, maybe I'm projecting too much of myself into other people. Maybe I assume that because I as a kid could tell the difference, that everyone else reasonably should be able to, as well. I sometimes forget that large swathes of our culture have built up an entire epistomology of belief that is designed to thwart reason and analysis.

I digress, though! The point here is that I wonder if I'll feel like Gabe and Tycho in a few years, or if I'll be able to recognize the difference between being a mentor and a parent, instead of a shield and a defender of the fantasy of childhood innocence. We need to protect our kids, yes....but from real threats, not fantasies.

Monetizing Tetris

Just in time for my Friday Rant, Penny Arcade summarizes my issues with EA in one fine comic:

The Final Aliens Post: A Decent Critique

Ben Kuchera of the Penny Arcade Report has an interesting article on why he feels Aliens: Colonial Marines failed as a game sequel to the movies, and why making a game out of the films is so difficult, if not impossible. It's a good read and I am inclined to agree with much of it in principle, even if I am far less harsh in my experience with the game, having found myself not even noticing or being bothered by so many of the features that apparently drove Ben and others nuts. The alien behavior, for example....I did not notice or was not bothered by poor AI during the play. Was it there? I guess, maybe. Truth is, I was enjoying the ride and was not bothered that the game experience wasn't a precise emulation of the style and feel of the movie in that way....I pretty much just assumed that we were dealing with a story about a group of more experienced, less cocky and more well-informed marines who weren't as foolhardy as the ones from the movie. Unlike Ben, I guess I entered the game not expecting it to be an emulation of the Aliens film, but its own thing, spinning off from it, and using the medium of video games to do what it could to give us an experience in that universe.

That said, I bet the guys behind Dead Space could have nailed it.

Anyway, read his commentary, I think it's an interesting perspective and carries through with the previous games, although I am less inclined to agree that throwing predators into the mix has been a very useful story tool....and in fact feel that the AvP games and movies have largely been let downs to both franchises.

Penny Arcade always Knows How to Make My Day

Penny Arcade always knows how to make my day!

Penny Arcade Follow Up: The Disemboweling of a Gaming Group for Our Amusement!

Since I posted about this before, it seemed worth a follow-up. You can follow the comic here, but the jist of it (the moral of the story, if you will!) is that gamers have problems with change, and it's not just an "old school vs. new school" deal, its purely a matter of comfort zones and what happens when they get violated. It tops off with the spectre of a looming and vile form from the shadows of gaming's past...the all encompassing antagonistic DM, and points out more or less how, much as we love such a character for the amusing fodder he offers, he is also often the reason people bail out of the hobby in the first place. It's a multiplayer game, and everyone needs to be able to have a good time, basically; it's not one guy spearfishing minnows in a barrel....!

Unrelated note, but as things have settled down, the wife has seen fit to grant me some shore leave and I will resume the Wednesday night 4E game tonight! I am quite excited. She's even letting me loose for saturday night's now venerable Pathfinder campaign, though I may stick to bi-weekly for saturday nights from here on out, giving me some more time with the Baby Dude Marcus, alias Froggie Gremlin (all babies look like froggish gremlins, what can I say) and his lovely mom.

Penny Arcade: The Pathfinding

Okay, this might seem minor but after a decade plus of following Penny Arcade, I find it really interesting: a defection in the making. Penny Arcade's always been a great barometer of "things that are genuinely interesting" as well as "things that deserve mocking" in the greater spectrum of the multimedia gaming industry, so it's really fascinating to see that even as they transition away from prior ties to 4E, Pathfinder has suddenly made its presence known. It's not quite the same as being popular to show up in Penny Arcade like this....more like a statement of being relevant.

So yeah, I don't want to say its a big deal, but in a weird way it kind of is. Either way, I get to resume my own Pathfinder game on December 10th, with the wife's blessings, so there ya go. It's not100% my game of choice (cough >Runequest< cough), and I find it clunky mechanically compared to 4E, but I am ready to concede that, at least in my neck of the woods, if I want to play RPGs, I better be ready to play or run Pathfinder.

Propaganda Games and Gender Issues in Video Gaming

Extra Credits on Penny Arcade TV is all about video game design, but sometimes their discussions veer into territory that applies to other media, and other times its just generally fascinating and thoughtful shows. This particular episode on propaganda games (both intentional and accidental) is especially interesting. Check it out here.

In thinking about it, there were two points in the Extra Credits take that I am not sure I agreed with. First, I was amazed at the number of intentional games of such a type out there, but I tend to feel that those products, like the pamphlets, books and videos that accompany them, are usually speaking to the choir. However, the idea of unintentional propaganda was really interesting. On the surface, it seems silly, but on consideration, there's some interesting truth to it.

Take the Royo art I posted below. Royo and others like him have been doing scantily clad female fantasy art for ages, and are more or less typical of stuff I grew up with in my own generation. However, I (and I optmistically would posit most men of my generation) do not inherently feel that this has generated a sense that women must wear fewer clothes to be noticed/successful, at least not as a proper social norm. There are and have always been stronger social pressures at work influencing such beliefs within my generation.

There's a real temptation to suggest that such may not be the case for the current generation of gamers, however. I think it's incorrect, in so far as the show may be confusing the issue of correlation with cause and effect. It may also be confusing what could be a much larger cultural change in normative values and relations between men, women, and how they perceive both themselves and one another. This is a different issue from the idea of a sexual reward/stimulus approach to skimpy female characters in video games right now, which is part of a bigger problem in the video game industry, demonstrating that it has not yet caught on that both women and men play these games, and in increasingly even numbers as time goes by. Should we one day see a Gears of War game where Marcus Phenix (or his descendant) has a no-shirt flowing hair mod/achievement reward to go along with whatever skimpy female models are offered, then we will be seeing a developer that, while still disingenuously using the "sex sells" theme in the game, has at least aknowledged that sex sells to both genders equally well.

Anyway, the problem of over-sexualization/visual mysoginy in games is not the cause, but a symptom. I think this video misses that point, perhaps because the Extra Credits crew are (like me) prone to optimism. The part that is a real problem in video games is marketing, the so-called "marcom" divisions of these publishers and their willingness to exploit through careful metrics the portion of their audience that is ruled by baser instincts. That in and of itself belies the greater issue that there are plenty of young men out there who are increasingly spending more and more time indoors, playing games with virtual female characters therein, and spending less time actually talking to real women.*

When I think back to the late eighties and early nineties, I recall plenty of friends and cohorts with a fear, animosity, sometimes even outright hatred or disgust toward women. It was all a large component of their innate uncertainty and fear at dealing with the opposite sex, coupled with an inability to rationalize or cope with the instinctive processes in the male psyche, and the prevalent need to have women in our lives that is ultimately part of the biological process of furthering the species, a feature of our chemistry which doesn't give a damn how awkward it makes our artificial human social constructs. In any case, I have to wonder how many of these guys, back in the pre-internet and pre-quasi-photorealistic video game days, would have simply isolated themselves from the world at large, avoided women, and started developing their perspectives on the fairer sex entirely from these carefully tailored artificial stimuli and experiences? What sort of effect would that have had, back then? I think there's a huge test bed for that going on out there in the real world right now, a sort of global skinner box.

Anyway, food for thought. I'm really hoping that by the time my son is old enough to start noticing women, that he's comfortably balanced enough and has a strong appreciation enough for real women as equals that the lurid temptations of video games and the internet are easy enough for him to resist (or better yet, to understand)...FSM knows that even without these things it was hard enough for guys from my generation!




* I could be off base here, though, as admittedly my sample is skewed toward the gamer crowd I hang with, and always has; anecdotally however even the hardcore football jocks and decidedly "normal" guys I have known throughout the years appear to have a bewildering range of antipathy and trepidation (if not disturbing hostility) toward the opposite sex. Again, this is probably a byproduct of necessary biological conditioning or instinct, a residual effect of the need for competitive action through aggression to pass on our genes, manifesting in its traditionally uncomfortable way as we have managed to develop civilized, intellectual culture that transcends our inherent programming, yet unfortunately we're still many decades away from the singularity of proper transhumanism, that will allow us to wipe out such impulses and recode our genes to spec instead of our current only choice of default "factory settings" nature has arbitrarily chosen for us (for better or worse).