I’m just going to break this into the pros and cons of the game.

Pros: Snappy dialogue. Amusing characters. Tricky but not absurdly complex puzzles. Voice acting was good, except for the lack of female actor in the first episode (so there was just a Pantomime Dame voice or three)

Cons: Over-the-top grotesque gags (seriously, I love dirty, inappropriate, irreverent things… but this was a little too far at times!). All female characters were especially unlikable slags. Inaccessible player character, protecting a town that was shit. I found myself aligning with the villain’s motivation to “clean up this town” more than Hector’s unwilling desire to find his pants and stop said villain.

Seriously. Like, the protagonist is the smartest of a town of the scum of the world, he’s not really interested in saving people, but for some reason he does. It’s almost like it’s just expected, “Oh, you bought the game, you’re here for an Adventure game, now GO!” And I have to admit, this is actually why I persisted in playing it. It wasn’t hard or overly irritating (no ragequit moment), but I’d spent good money on it and wanted to get my money’s worth. I was mildly more engaged when playing as Lambert, the idiot assistant. At least he was kinda adorable and endearing, like a puppy. His motivation was believable… “I want to help Hector!”

Overall, I’m curious as to how many people actually enjoyed the experience of playing the game. Did they feel motivated by the storyline? I was actually disappointed that it was difficult to get into the game, as the dialogue was well written and the puzzles were enjoyably challenging.

Oh man, they made me rage.

The first thing I noticed was my complete lack of empathy with the player character (in BOTH games), which led to a lack of investment in the goals of the game. I only continued playing them because a) I’d paid $20 for the first, and b) I wanted to give the second a fair chance, considering it’s by an Australian developer.

But I couldn’t get over it. I also couldn’t get over how, despite the stories themselves being fairly interesting, the structure of the stories were so flawed that I was just irritated, left with feelings of “why am I doing this?” and “why isn’t this over?”

This isn’t to say that they didn’t do anything right. There were a few things that impressed me, such as well-planned puzzle arcs and interdependencies. I always like those. Proper reviews to come shortly. But, oh my God (the God of narratives/stories/I think that’s Dionysus? He’s also the God of wine and possibly orgies, so that’s pretty cool), do you want to know why point-and-click adventure games aren’t selling so well? Because the best part of them (the adventure) is so average. The writers… I seriously wonder whether they’ve ever learnt anything about writing for any medium where they have to try to keep the audience’s interest (as opposed to the kind of writing that fills time in transit between more interesting events/locations).

There are a few reasons I’ve been absent, the main two being my health and being busy with a ScreenWest Digital Breakout Development Fund grant application. I’ll write more about these later (well, I guess not so much about my health because that’s personal and it’s mostly under control or getting there), but for now I just wanted to post something to bring the blog back to life. Expect more soon!

Hm, okay. Well, earlier, I talked about the Magic Circle concept, and how it’s based on pre-conceived assumptions and ideas about the world, and then these ideas are “played out” in order to satisfy some desire for them (and remember, kids: desire isn’t the bad part. Inappropriate action is the bad part!). So, essentially, I could argue using proven psychology, that watching Looney Toons or Power Rangers or even Superman made us more selfish and violent (I should note, just for fun, that Superman was based on Nietzche’s concept of the “Ubermensch,” who was the man completely free of the constraints of life around him, emotionally free to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, utterly selfish). All of these examples reinforced the belief that violence, aggression, picking on others, and disregarding the feelings of others have no consequence. I’m probably going to now have someone vehermently defend Power Rangers in the comments… Guys that’s not what this is about. Hold your horses; I’m trying to defend video games by choosing innocuous childhood favourites!

Evolutionarily, we probably need to have violence imprinted in our psyche to survive. I’m not saying “ban all things that have a snippet of violence!” Even if you’re a creationist or otherwise don’t believe in evolution, merely to survive, we probably need to know something about violence (at least to win those Holy Wars … uhoh, I’m going to get RAGED)! Violence itself isn’t the problem, the inappropriate expression or direction of violent behaviour is the problem. Punch your pillow, that’s not hurting anyone. Punch someone in the pub… PROBABLY uncalled for.

But back to watching Looney Toons. So, as a child, you watched these cute, funny cartoons about slapstick violence. No one gets hurt, right? They all bounce back! And then, you go outside with your sibling or friend, and you play “Looney Toons.” You have mock-arguments. You have mock-violence. Parents think you’re cute for setting up imaginary ACME traps. But then you get older, and you watch the news, and you watch violent films and tv shows where everyone is horrible to each other. It’s funny, and they say all the things you want to but can’t (or at least shouldn’t). So you sit at your gaming device of choice, load up some FPS or Fighting Game with lots of blood and graphic depictions of violence… and somehow you’re suddenly an outcast with antisocial, pathological violent tendencies.

But it was so CUTE when I was a kid!

What I’m trying to say is that games aren’t the problem. I’m not going to say that films aren’t the problem, either, even though a more passive viewing position allows more information to be impressed , unquestioned, on the viewer than the “ergodic” (texts that you need to “work” at to move forward) viewer, who is focusing on winning more than the idea that, “Being a psychopath is totally fun, yo.” The problem is that we aren’t viewing play as what it is- we’re viewing it as training and an influence, rather than a mimicry of something we’ve ALREADY seen, and a way of feeling the same forms of power, victory, success, and value as that guy in the movie that we liked. And I think those studies about violent behaviour and violent video games are dumb. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that maybe post-gaming they feel more aggression because their fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system response is already pumped up to deal with the perceived threat in a high-risk imagined situation. Or maybe they’re pissed off that they had to quit the game without saving. All that work for nothing? I’ve given up on games because I had to repeat a sequence of events because the save game didn’t work!

Firstly, while the phrase “Magic Circle” is from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) as most people assume, he only uses it in an extremely throwaway form and doesn’t actually seem to give too much weight to it, listing it amongst a number of other settings as “consecrated spots” or “play-grounds.” The concept, attributed to him, actually even isn’t his. The first documented example of a similar concept that I could find was within Lev Vygotsky’s essay, “Play and the Mental Development of the Child,” written in 1933. Vygotsky concedes that other earlier writers have discussed what he refers to as an “imaginary situation,” but they describe it as an aspect or secondary symptom of play, which only occurs within a subset of all activities that together can classify an activity as play. Vygotsky decided that this Imaginary Situation is far more significant in identifying play, and believed that all play must exist within a situation that has some sort of boundaries, whether physical/literal like a sports pitch, or completely abstract such as believable or acceptable portrayals of characters.

Vygotsky placed a heavy focus on play not necessarily being “pleasurable” (so much for all those ludologists-and-developers-turned-author-educators who say that the key aspect of games is that they must be “fun”!), but rather on the needs and desires of the child not being met immediately. Based on a generalisation of a number of events or let-downs, play, according to Vygotsky, is always an “imaginary, illusory realization of unrealizable desires.” These situations, he explains, already have an assumed code of conduct or set of rules which must be adhered to. They may not be pre-defined or explicitly stated, but they work on a preconceived notion of the appropriate behaviour of the individual within the play situation. In this respect, the player is like an actor playing a role, whether improvising or fitting their actions to the dialogue, based on the (often more defined and agreed upon by the director and actor) assumptions about the character and the situation.

In play, the imaginary situation is formed from a stereotype based on current beliefs about the world. Vygotsky gives the example of two sisters may play a game of “sisters,” and act out ideas about the way sisters should be, based on their existing knowledge from books, films, etc. A gamer will play a survivor in a zombie apocalypse based on their existing knowledge from horror films, or an assassin based on their assumptions about what assassins do and how they act. This knowledge can be primary, where they have seen or experienced it themselves, or secondary, where they are told/shown about it. Interesting to me is that sometimes these ideas are built and modified over time within society, so an individual playing a “vampire” would have a very different portrayal based on whether their primary reference was folk tales from the middle ages, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or Twilight. Gothic Horror, as well as the desire to experience fear, have their own explanations behind them, which I will leave for another day.

The Magic Circle is often used to merely describe in-game world versus real life, and there has been disagreement as to whether it protects the game from real life, or real life from the game. Sometimes there is an accusation that the membrane is entirely permeable, and that games directly influence someone’s perception of the real world. This assumes that this barrier is there to protect us from blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. It’s more like an oil bubble on water- sure, they can mix, but the natural state of play is to exist on its own, floating atop reality. I suspect the play influencing life argument stems from a “learning-through-doing” mentality, and requires a discrediting belief that no one can tell the difference between this imaginary situation and real life. Somehow, when I play Napoleon in Civilisation, I have no idea that I’m actually a girl. Now, I’ve played male characters on stage (the curses/blessings of an all-girl’s school), and as soon as I walk off stage, I remember who I am. I take my costume and makeup off. This might be different for a Method actor, but I guarantee that most gamers don’t put in as much effort to prepare for their role.

Essentially, the Magic Circle is an over-inflated concept based on an idea of unknown origin that was emphasised by one theorist, mentioned by another, and credited to them by someone else. If there is something to take away from this, it’s that most successful games should work on pre-existing concepts (and yes, pre-existing genre or control systems count, although that’s really a bit weak and not what I’m trying to talk about), assume an amount of shared cultural knowledge, and are understood by players to be a construction. If anyone can’t actually tell the difference between a construction and reality (especially one that is so visibly mediated through screens and controllers), then I’m sorry to say, but maybe they just happen to have a mental disorder and should be treated. For the rest of us, what’s wrong with having a little fun?

So in a way, I guess sad stories have been a release for me when I feel down and am unable to express myself adequately in real life. Instead, I can escape into a sad book and feel emotion through the veil of the characters.

Whether that’s healthy or not, I can’t say.

But, for all that sad stories capture me and offer a release, I cannot seem to write a story that has a sad ending.

So I wrote her a LONG reply. I’ve (barely… I removed half a line) edited it a little for here, but I’m putting it up because it’s on the same thread as a blog post I’m preparing that’s a little more “academic.”

Regarding whether it’s unhealthy to enjoy the experience of someone else’s misfortune via a sad story or whatever- well, I am writing a blog post about this, but no, it’s not.

Tragedy was considered a very important part of Ancient Greek culture- it guarded against excesses of virtue/vice. It caused the audience to first feel horror at the experience of the hero, and then feel relief that it wasn’t happening to them, followed by a fear that it COULD.

Aside from this, there is enough research into play and fantasy, especially of negative emotions. These emotions occur to us, we all know they do. We like to feel fear on rollercoasters, we like to cry over sad stories. But we don’t want to really be falling for our lives or have something sad happen to us. Hence, we enjoy experiencing them in Imagined Situations (Vygotsky’s term for it), suspending our disbelief (see Coleridge), but deep down knowing that we’re safe. Do we enjoy the actual experience, or reawakening safe? I’m not sure.

I just went largely off-topic based on one line you wrote  But I think that while sad/tragic/scary/horror stories have their place, so do happy stories. We all want to believe that we can achieve something great. We want to see someone like us achieve happiness. We want to feel happy for someone we deem worthy. I don’t actually believe they are opposites, but they complement. I love Hans Christian Andersen, but I love the Grimm brothers as well as the similar stories Dad has read me from Slovakian folklore. I also always loved Aesop’s fables. Many of these are extremely abstract and use large amounts of symbolism. They are warnings, they are moral. They had poor narrative structure sometimes. They often involved something potentially very bad happening, but then order being restored. They were warnings that at the end said, “It’s okay. Don’t live your life naively, but don’t live in constant fear.”

I also loved Little Golden Books and one called Whistle For Willie, which was about a little boy who couldn’t whiste to call his pet dog. I think in the end he learned how to whistle? But I loved just being in his world, drawing on the pavement with chalk with him. Every story has its place. Sometimes it’s nice to live in a happy place for a little while 

In the meantime, I have been staying up and losing sleep over playing the original SID MEYER’S CIVILIZATION! Yes, that’s right. CIV1! One of my favourite games from childhood… but unlike Jones in the Fast Lane, I haven’t retained all my skill and tactics. How the hell do I get my cities to actually grow over population 10? I mean, I know I need the aqueduct. But people just start hating me and starving and shit. Urgh. So, after about three or four sleepless nights, I decided I wanted to play something else. I didn’t feel like playing Jones, either, so I went to Abandonia and looked for some gems, finally deciding to download and play The Legend of Kyrandia 1, which my boyfriend has played before (apparently I’m up to the part that got him stuck for a VERY long time… teehee), because my friend Joseph B Hewitt IV was one of the artists on it

I’ve only played it for one night, I’m up to the Birthstones Quest thing. No spoilers, please!

Making a game that doesn’t require a lot of information to play is always tricky, and Gamejam games that don’t have a tutorial or anything always win an extra award. Redder just relies purely on using ←↨→ and spacebar (although the up arrow also works as jump). Pretty easy- you don’t even need to know the convention of using WASD!

And talk about the right amount of story… that (extremely) brief intro communicates the context of the game exactly. Exciting diamonds = fuel, the spaceship runs out and you, little astronaut, need to go look for more.

It starts off relatively easy, and while “hard” and “difficult” aren’t exactly the right words to use here (for me, they imply “impossible” and “I keep dying”), it becomes increasingly tricky to get to the diamonds, often requiring more and more foresight, skill, and spatial orientation (the map helps).

I’m a sucker for pixel art, and I think it really works well for REDDER. Plus, I don’t know if my computer was somehow glitching (I don’t think so, but I’m open to it), but after you’ve been playing for a while, getting closer to your goal, some trippy stuff starts happening. It’s not enough to distract you, and it breaks up the visual monotony of walking through the same chambers again and again purely because you missed the jump and fell to the ground three chambers below.

I also really enjoyed the music. I would like to say more about this, but all you need to know is that it suits the visual style as well as the theme, and doesn’t get annoying after playing for hours (at least, I didn’t get bored of it. I wouldn’t mind playing it now…)

I played it at AdultSwim Games, but you can find it on its native home at Newgrounds.

If I shrug my shoulders, you won't notice that my jacket doesn't fit properly

Okay, so I’m writing this because it’s what I’m thinking about right now. And it’s making me super frustrated.

Why? Because everything I’m looking for assume that you’re male. So, apparently, I should be wearing dress pants, discreet belt, polished shoes and the big debate is whether I should be wearing a tie or not with my buttoned, collared shirt. I might as well just go dressed as Marlene Dietrich.

This feature article at Game Career Guide is moderately helpful, except for this amusing suggestion:

Jason Weesner, a developer at Crystal Dynamics and Game Career Guide writer, suggests dressing as if you’re going on a first date.

Riiight… so I guess that means wearing something sexy, low-cut, with high-heels? But only lip-gloss, just in case the chemistry is too much and we end up pashing furiously.

Yeah, no.

Why doesn’t someone just say something like, “think about the impression you’re trying to give- creative, professional, approachable”?
This, to me, seems like a better way to think about putting together something to wear. I think that does mean that I need to buy new shoes. Smelly $5 ballet flats or ratty, hippy-looking Cons don’t seem to make the cut.

Anyway, what I seem to do is come up with all these great ideas and play all these fun games, but I never end up writing up my thoughts! So, I’m going to write a bunch TODAY. And then they will be posted in the future, and hopefully that will give me a period of grace to write some more. Shh, I’m revealing my secret. Don’t tell anyone