#like of COURSE you want to build a storyline that's going to encourage player unity

[mishapen-dear]

okay so- for a while now, i've theorized about the federation's goal being to drive the islanders apart. they keep giving quests that cause conflict between the players (foolish and mr mustard, everything cellbit, getting bad to do a federation quest for an incredible reward Immediately after max asked bad to never work for the feds). They even divide their own agents, what with making cellbit get info on the timer dungeon in secret, the same dungeon that THEY sent jaiden to. But one thing has never made sense to me. What about the eggs? The eggs were provided by the federation, and they've proven to be the single most uniting feature of the QSMP. Their quests update every day to send players wandering around the island, helping each other and hanging out and sending felps motivational messages for his square. the eggs and their quests are the antithesis of the federation's assumed goal of player conflict.

but the eggs were introduced as a competition.

whoever's egg was happiest at the end of the event would get a reward, and whoever's egg was dead would be punished. this has, for meta reasons, obviously changed, but the initial premise remains the same- people were teamed up in pairs, and never punished for killing other people's eggs, only ever their own. the point wasn't "protect the eggs" it was to "protect YOUR egg" and sometimes that meant protecting them from other players.

but the federation has sort of. just ignored the eggs ever since. (unless they're using them to manipulate the islanders for further conflict)

the code, on the other hand, has been ALL about the eggs. its attacked them, its mimicked them, its taken pictures of them and sent the parents into a flurry to protect them. the code is an antagonist that the parents ALL work together to protect the eggs from.

its also changed the egg quests.

which means it can change the egg quests. which means it can ambush the players. an argument can be made against its ability to spell, but we also saw codeChayanne forming full sentences on his signs during the election dinners. There is at least one code that is able to communicate with the players.

there is a non-zero chance that it's not the federation continuing the egg quests, getting the players working together, but the codes.

remember the timer dungeon...? the code didn't attack them. it sent them on a quest (where they had to work together) to send the train off of the island. At the election dinners the codes weren't attacking any eggs (richarlyson) they were attacking the election candidates. By attacking the election candidates (who some islanders had become suspicious of) the codes made those candidates targets of the very same protection instinct that they saw when attacking the eggs.

and its been a very long time since the codes have attacked any eggs.

I don't know what the point of mimicking the eggs would be. I don't know. but i do know that the federation can't be trusted with keeping peace on the island

#qsmp #its SO interesting from a meta perspective #like of COURSE you want to build a storyline that's going to encourage player unity #when the whole purpose of the smp is multilingual unity #which means you need people to want to hang out together #and giving them an antagonist that non-explicitly wants their segregation is SUCH an interesting way to go about that #and whatever the fuck is up with the codes #and literally everything going on with the eggs #they turned the whole island into a parent support group lmaooo and it's worked out so well #but no yeah im. suspicious. #rememebr when the eggs got kidnapped the first time? all of them #and the players had to go around and help each other to free them? #are we sure *that* was the federation and not the code?

[aurelliocheek]

Book of Heroes: Making a new The Dark Eye game

A new Finnish studio is bringing the tabletop feeling to the screen.

The Dark Eye (original: Das Schwarze Auge) is a true classic. The roleplaying game was developed 36 years ago by the German Ulrich Kiesow and laid the foundation for hundreds of novels, board games – and video games of course. Since the last one, The Dark Eye: Blackguards 2 by Daedalic, five years have passed.

This summer a new game brings the players back into the fantasy world Aventuria. Like in the original Pen&Paper game, The Dark Eye: Book of Heroes is about role-playing together with your friends. Four players combine the specialities of the different species and professions to overcome enemies, puzzles and challenges in the myriad of procedurally generated maps. Twelve different professions and eight individual storylines should provide long-lasting gaming fun. Book of Heroes is the first game of new Finnish developer Random Potion in collaboration with publisher Wild River Games and DSA rights holder Ulisses.  We talk with Creative Director Arto ­Koistinen and CEO Kirsi Rossi about the development of The Dark Eye: Book of ­Heroes.

What kind of game is Book of Heroes? Arto Koistinen: BoH is an RPG for busy people. There are plenty of ­action games with similarly easy ways of dropping in and out, but no real roleplaying games like this. Kirsi Rossi: Book of Heroes is a game that consists of several shorter adventures that form longer stories. All the RPG elements are there but compared to the epic RPGs that require hundreds of hours playing, BoH gives you an easy way to play when you have time, or your friends are online and you’d like to play a couple of hours with them. It also doesn’t require a long time to get yourself familiar with the system, so it’s easy to start playing it but of course for the ones who’d like to immerse themselves into an epic RPG the experience is not that deep.

Only part of the Random Potion team is enjoying a summer day in Tampere, Finland, before working on Book of Heroes.

Please tell us briefly about your career in the gaming industry. And how it all started with Random Potion? Kirsi: I haven’t worked with games before. It’s been something that I have thought about earlier but because I don’t have a developer background there are less opportunities, though the situation has changed a lot recently when there are more big studios. I joined Random Potion when Arto asked if I’d be interested in to take care of the business side of the company three years ago. Entrepreneurship is something that I have wanted to try, so it was a perfect opportunity for me. Arto: I started in the industry in 2007 as a game designer for mobile games, the company worked solely on licensed games, so I did small games for big brands such as Star Wars and Pixar. After that, I founded my first company Dicework Games, where I did programming, design, writing and business, so pretty much everything else than art or music. I’ve also worked at Kyy Games, another local company, in multiple positions. We started Random Potion with a group of friends from the industry, mainly because we wanted to work together on new projects. Book of Heroes was an idea I’d had in one form or another for several years, and finally, the pieces for the design started coming together. In retrospect, it was probably too big a project for a new company, but fortunately, everything turned out well!

How big is your team at the moment? Do you hire? Kirsi: We have ten people at the moment in the company and in our team. We don’t hire at the moment.

How did the collaboration with Ulisses and Wild River come about? Kirsi: We met Wild River a couple of times at game events like gamescom where we showed our game demo and later how it as progressed. Later on, we started to talk about the collaboration with Wild River and got introduced also with Ulisses.

Arto: I also attended a convention hosted by Ulisses where I met both the Ulisses people and the fans, and it was a great experience, and especially awesome to meet all these people very enthusiastic about The Dark Eye.

How close do you work together? Kirsi: We have weekly meetings with Wild River’s producer, and we also use Slack, where we can chat when there’s anything to ask, comment etc. If we have questions of the Dark Eye universe, we can also talk with Ulisses, and they have provided us with a lot of material and also checked the stories that are in the game so that they don’t conflict with the DSA universe.

Unity is the main development tool. If for beasts, items, or entire portions of the maps — it will end up in Unity.

What are your sources of inspiration? Kirsi: Overall, for me, I love old-school RPG games. I remember when I was a kid and got often stuck to Mario or other similar games because I wasn’t that good and patient enough to practise. When I found RPGs, it felt like coming home because I didn’t get that frustrating feeling of playing the same setting over and over again (or asking someone else to play it for me so that I could continue the game).

Arto: Baldur’s Gate was a big inspiration in the beginning, especially for the core gameplay, visuals and controls. We opted for a different approach in meta though, having bite-sized adventures connected by personal stories instead of a big epic campaign. Of course, there is also a lot of influence from roguelikes, of which my favourite is probably ADOM.

Are you fans of The Dark Eye? Kirsi: The Dark Eye is not that well known in Finland. I like to play tabletop RPGs and also try different games, and it’s been great to get to know also The Dark Eye. I am a big fan of monsters, and there are many that I like in the Dark Eye. I also like lizardfolk, and it would be great to have them somewhere in the game… (smiles) Arto: We are now! (smiles)

Did you play previous TDE games? Arto: I had played Chains of Satinav before the project and when we started also played Memoria and both the Blackguards games.

How did you get the game design process, what was your approach? Arto: We already had a vertical slice of the game that used a different system when we started working with The Dark Eye. In the pre-TDE project, we had a pretty ad hoc process where we knew the high-level design and where we wanted to go but did the concrete design as the project progressed, seeing what worked and what didn’t. When we started converting that base to The Dark Eye, we first took the rules and decided what would work for our game and how and what we had to drop out. I’m happy to say we got a lot of the core rules in and even some additional ones from the other sourcebooks! There was a lot of back and forth with Ulisses for the storylines so everything is canon for the setting. We’ve also tested the game with fans of The Dark Eye and integrated that feedback into the finished game.

Kirsi: I am not involved in game design as I am more of taking care of the company and project itself, e.g. schedules and communication with the publisher. However, because we are a small studio, I have tested the game a lot (over 100 hours of gameplay…). I also like to join the game design meetings and encourage everyone in a team to be involved because I think it’s important that everyone has a feeling of ownership of the project.

Even though Book of Heroes is a co-op game by heart, you can embark solo on the adventures and hire some henchmen for the quest. For a price.

TDE is known for it’s unique system of dicing samples. How did you implement this system to the game as algorithm for the gameplay? Arto: We have the skill system in the game pretty much as-is, the game handles the skill rolls when need and shows the results of the rolls to the player, along with all the three dice rolls and the final Quality Level. Some rolls are automated by the game (e.g. Perception), and some are initiated by the player (e.g. Picklocks).

In which area will the game take place? Arto: In the Middenrealm, mostly concentrating on the west, Kosh and Northmarches areas.

Book of Heroes is a Coop-RPG. Why is the multiplayer approach important to you, and how challenging is the implementation? Kirsi: We chose co-op because we wanted to make a game with a similar feeling of playing together like in tabletop RPGs. In tabletop RPGs I can still remember some game sessions many years ago, and I think that it’s players who bring the game alive. Multiplayer itself is absolutely more challenging technically compared to the solo game and also for a new team like us many people advised not to make a first game multiplayer.

How important is the story in Book of ­Heroes for you? Kirsi: There are several different stories, and also the players with whom you play have their own stories. I think the story is important, but for me, it’s also important to have fun instead of just advancing my own story. I hope that game can give a nice setting to meet friends or completely new people.

Arto: Theirs is actually more story in the game than readily apparent to the casual observer. We’re especially invested in ­player-driven stories, and the character creation takes a story-first approach, where every choice you make tells you a bit more about the character’s background. The personal storylines are also a very important part of the game, and while you can mostly skip them if you want, they contain a lot of lore and world-building.

Talking about the development process: What problems did you encounter in ­g­eneral, and how did you deal with them? Kirsi: In game development team the fascinating but also challenging part is that teams are multi-disciplinary where there are programmers, artists, business people etc. and everyone has their own way of working. It’s important to bring devs together because making games is teamwork and it’s important to understand how my work is affecting to somebody else’s.

Arto: One of the biggest challenges is making everything work together in a game that has as many moving pieces as we do – and in multiplayer too! Getting a feature or a piece of content to work is one thing; getting it to work in a multiplayer environment is a completely another. We’re also balancing between meeting the expectations of a multiplayer RPG and a TDE game, which can be tricky because those expectations can at times be ­conflicting.

The combat feels a lot like the tabletop original. Hence the dice symbols and the numbers.

Which aspects are the most difficult to ­i­mplement. Do you also have to leave something out? Kirsi: We had to leave a lot of things out, and I think it’s an on-going conversation because time is limited, but there would be so many ideas to bring alive.

Arto: Pathfinding in a multiplayer game with procedurally generated levels has proven to be a hurdle, but fortunately one that’s now behind us. Then there’s the adventure generation where we want to have maps that are interesting enough but should never be incompletable.

Which engine do you use? What advantages does it offer you? Arto: We use Unity. Personally, I’ve been using it for over eleven years, and it’s a fine engine that gives us most of what we need out of the box and also has great support in the form of community and available ­plug-ins.

How do you feel about crunchtime? What experiences have you had with crunchtime in recent years? Kirsi: I haven’t worked before in-game ­studio so I have only read about the crunching. We don’t crunch, and if a dev asks can s/he do work e.g. on the weekend, it’s always temporary solution and extra hours can be used later to have an extra day off. Personally, I am a bit of a workaholic, and it’s been tough to learn to take time off because being an entrepreneur work basically never ends, but I have also noticed that it affects to the quality of the work if I do long time work in the evenings and weekends.

How hard is it for you to deal with the corona crisis? Does it influence the completion and release date? Kirsi: We have been working completely remote one month now, and we have short daily meetings online every workday. When the crises started, one challenge was to get the computers to everyone because we have tabletop computers (gaming laptops are more expensive compared to the tabletop ones). Crisis doesn’t seem to influence to the completion of the project, but I keep my finger’s crossed that nobody catches corona.

Kirsi Rossi CEO

Kirsi is the CEO and Business Developer at Random Potion. Being a free spirit, she has travelled around the globe and lived on three continents. Professionally, she has worked in B2B marketing and events taking care of administrative tasks. She has a MBA in Knowledge Management and she about to graduate in MTech majoring in entrepreneurship.

Arto Koistinen Creative Director

Arto is a game developer who has been a game designer, programmer, CEO, writer and some other things in his 13 years in the industry. He has worked on small mobile games for big brands such as Star Wars and Pixar, made an award winning RPG Rimelands: Hammer of Thor, and written very punny jokes for Knights of Pen and Paper 2

The post Book of Heroes: Making a new The Dark Eye game appeared first on Making Games.

Book of Heroes: Making a new The Dark Eye game published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

[popmitzvah]

Now I Am Become Slut, Destroyer of Worlds

The host is alive. She is sentient. She is self-aware. And she knows you have programmed her to attack herself and the others.

Nope! Not a blog about Westworld! At least, most of it isn’t. I want to talk about The Bachelor and I want to explain why this show is the place to be, if you’re into the shock of watching creations outsmart their creator-controllers.  The more I read this Bach season as a rumination on feeling fictional and clawing for “reality,” the more I was reminded of HBO’s ambitious series on gnosticism, humanity, and the function of storytelling. Might even go so far to say that these two shows share a soul; Dolores Abernathy would be right at home at a rose ceremony!

Please follow me, down into a fake mansion that houses a harem, where we can take a closer look at the things that made The Bachelor so distinctive in its 21st season: existential female anxiety, textual reflexivity, and the peculiar journey of Corinne, a single trope that managed to awaken and rewrite herself.

Born into an apocalyptic Trumpworld, this iteration of The Bachelor became something kind of dark, dreadful, and a little bit out-of-control. Of course, The Bachelor is always a circus, and that’s why so many people hate it: for a television fan, it takes a strong set of stones to follow something so vapid, so dependent on tired stereotypes and romantic wish-fulfillment, so misogynistic, so corporate and disingenuous. How many different ways can producers arrange 30 beautiful women in a Love Thunderdome as they compete for the affections of one bland white man? But there was something poisonous in American culture at large that made Season 21 into something else, something crazier. Perhaps the 2016 election left a vacuum of hope that encouraged The Bachelor producers to lean into self-destruction as an aesthetic. Perhaps we, the audience, are evolving to watch ourselves watching TV, and we prefer everything to be kind of about storytelling – ergo the timely popularity of diverse “meta” shows like Westworld, American Horror Story, Fleabag.

Either way, the new Bachelor was defined by these new and distinctive notes:

Contestants who bristled inside their assigned story cages and pointedly drew attention to the process of being written as characters.

The season’s primary “villain,” Corinne, who transcended the confines of the Bach with a Joker-like sense of chaotic sexuality and stunningly re-branded her arc as sex-positive feminist heroism.

An unwilling Bachelor whose weird charisma relied on his apathy, nihilism, and constant critique of the format. Nick undermined our reception of the Bachelor experience by positioning himself as a bored observer – distancing himself from the contestants and the ideological underpinnings of the show.

First, I want to take on Bullet Number One – the Westworldian crises of self that entered this season of the Bachelor early on and began the process of destabilizing narratives and the women forced to live them. Take a look at what happened to Jasmine G on Night 1. Now, it’s not unusual for Bachelor women to immediately recoil from the uncanniness of this environment –  to be a Bachelor contestant, to be on a reality dating competition, is to be subjected to spirit-breaking. These women are tested every moment with the pressures of self-criticism, of being filmed, of being beautiful, of being charming, of systematically attacking and defeating your stunning competitors. But something about Jasmine G’s body language and wording struck me as a crisis of self, a dissociative episode which bespeaks her sudden awareness that she is performing and this whole thing – maybe any love-hunt – is theater without meaning.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s out of my control. There’s nothing I can do. Holy shit. Who the fuck am I? I’m blown away right now. Who am I?”

Night 1 would be the first of Jasmine’s many system failures, glitches in her personality and physical affect which provided an alarming counterpoint to the self-policing composure we’re used to seeing on these women. Nick eliminated her because of her unpleasant urge to question the “realism” of herself, of him, of the experience. And this was not the only instance of unusual meta-awareness amongst the women. Many of the others expressed a certain repugnance at the roles in which they were pigeonholed – at their status as storylines. Liz’s only mission, with mounting desperation, was to rewrite her way from Nick’s opportunistic ex-fling all the way to romantic legitimacy. Taylor realized too late that her Bachelor persona and “real” professional life were being mapped onto one another and she’d dug herself into the “bitch bully” hole (with the help of her nemesis Corinne). Taylor also literally theorized that some women are better-programmed for love! What could be more Westworld than attempting to parse the resident slut’s “emotional intelligence”?

So there was a significant change in the show here, in which the women’s grasp or ignorance of “being produced” was of paramount importance to how we perceived them. To compare these women to WW characters like Dolores and Maeve – remaining basic, guileless, and easily overwritten ensured a measure of success in the competition and preserved their classic Bachelor likeability factor.

So with that said, I’m dying to get back to Corinne. Here was a contestant who really jumped off the screen for reasons I’ve never seen an antagonist “pop” before. Unlike a villain such as, say, Season 20’s Olivia, Corinne worked to distinguish herself as a breakout character – not just through behavior but through actual world-building. Starting the show out by mentioning her current nanny Raquel was a stroke of genius; Raquel was a framing device that indicated Corinne inhabited a bizarre fantasy world inside and outside the show. In so many ways. Corinne deliberately ate endless blocks of cheese on camera. She feigned naps, eyes closed, smiling beatifically as she “dreamed” of Nick. She self-consciously and joyfully delivered dialogue she knew would light up the internet. Clutching her breasts and huffing, “Does this seem like someone who’s immature?” Staring soullessly into the lens and intoning, “My heart is gold, but my vagine is platinum.” Luring Nick into an inexplicable bounce house and toplessly dry-humping him with abandon. Corinne’s promiscuity, and her persona, were over-the-top but deliberately, defiantly, and delightfully self-choreographed. We know the floozy never wins, but when the floozy knows it, ignores it, and enjoys her role, she transcends happy endings.

And most interestingly, Corinne elevated her self-awareness and self-programming into a magnificent final act. During “The Women Tell All” (a reunion episode which airs before the finale) Corinne, in one fell swoop, ret-conned her entire Bachelor journey as a feminist rumspringa. “I was just doing me,” she demurely insisted, while the other contestants fought to defend her sexual agency. They leaped to defend the resident slut as the bravest and most authentic person amongst them. Corinne sat, resplendent, her eyes bearing no trace of the mischief and malevolence that had been her character cornerstones. She’d accomplished a rewrite akin to “it was all a dream.” Later, women sobbed while Liz declared her sexual encounter with Nick had not “defined” her, and they took turns praising their sister for her humanitarian work. The thematic tide-turn from “a search for true love” to “an inner journey toward female unity and empowerment” made for the most overtly political and topical episode The Bachelor has had, maybe ever – and it bespoke the malleability of reality fiction in a way the show has never previously approached.

In many ways, it was Bachelor Nick’s abdication of his role that allowed the TV text to refocus itself on the women “waking up” and growing through their relationships to one another. It’s hard, as a viewer, to engage with story about passive female players being driven toward romantic fulfillment, when the end-goal is a guy who’d be content to go home immediately and eat cold pizza. As we know, the guy had already been through two seasons of The Bachelorette and one summer of Bachelor in Paradise – his entire narrative was “last-ditch effort for love.” Nick made it his business to call out the fakery of The Bachelor, and the futility of it: “Let’s try to be as normal as possible in an abnormal environment.” “I’ve been in their shoes, and I know how much it sucks.” I certainly like Nick as a person – I like that he cries when he feels stuff, and I like that he hates being The Bachelor but loves being famous, and I like that he let women who were too good for him go, so they could fly and be free and be the first black Bachelorette. But if Nick did anything other than represent a neat resolution of the presented Bachelor narrative, he effectively denied our suspension of disbelief and exposed this particular season as “reality farce with no point.” Prince Charming was just in it for the international travel and the free food. I sympathize. And it’s fun to watch The Bachelor pretend that this isn’t a huge problem.

SO! I posit here that, at least for this season, The Bachelor evolved beyond the story of single women and their search for love. You might say that instead of being about singlehood, this show became about “the singularity” – that moment when program/character/trope/story/world comes alive and begins to adapt and change itself. I wonder: is it a better ride for the reality-consuming audience, when “we know they know”? At what point does watching a character with meta-awareness become confusing, or tiresome, rather than thrilling? And most importantly, what are the differences between watching reality television and prestige drama when we’re grappling with these issues? This question, perhaps, is of paramount importance for TV fans as we go forward; if there’s something in the water that’s poisoning every genre of narrative experience (or making it tastier), we have to put our fingers on it. Why do I watch so much television about women in traps, whose self-actualization and creative escapes are catalyzed by patriarchal violence? Why is it so easy to find that story?

I think it’s easy to brush aside shows like The Bachelor precisely because they are so heavily consumed, across political and cultural lines, and “mass appeal” television has the reputation of reifying harmful structures of power. For really good reason. But it’s important to locate these small moments of medium-transcendence within these TV texts. More and more, the characters we use and abuse are turning directly towards us. These fictional delights have real ends, and it’s never, never about the final rose.

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#westworld #the bachelor #corinne #nick viall #media studies #narrative theory