Stay Classy San Diego

San Diego comic con is still a thing for the next 2 years at least.  

Evade Gismo does San Diego comic con. North Americas largest comic con is upon us once again! Who wants to wait in line? 

I pity the fools that consider this a holiday, It is anything but relaxing here. Neck bearded mouth breathing nerds are common place now, they can be heard reciting Star Wars rhetoric verbatim while they wait in a 3 day line up for the panel Saturday. This is the hype trains last stop. If you pay close attention you can actually see the hypes residual fog laying thick and low over San Diegos gas lamp area like forest fire smoke. Dense and evenly distributed. I'm surprised more shit doesn't light on fire here given the incredible expectations and ensuing disappointments that the fanatics have nowadays.

This marks my 5th attended Comic Con in a row since meeting my wife.Compared to her I'm a rookie, for Camilla this is her 17th year in a row! It's the most exhausting 5 days of the year. We wake up early to get some sort of sustenance make our way to the con 5 blocks away and work the booth for 10 hrs. Then back to the hotel and immediately change and go out to some industry parties, drink schmooze, stay out late then donut all over again x4. Like every year we will be dispensing her wares at booth #4723 so don't be shy come and visit. 

So I'll be taking frequent breaks during the day to deliver any video game related newsy morsels I happen upon. Unfortunately I don't see myself having the time to line up for any panels this year. Maybe one if I can manage it. In fact I despise waiting in line, there is no celebrity I would ever wait in line to meet, no artist I would spend my standing or patience powers on. 

But this year, for the website, I'll suffer the crowds for some game demos and hopefully some VR as well as general tomfoolery. Fun pending...please stand by. 

P.s. Most posts this week will be attached to the Exceptionally tiny Instagram icon found at the bottom of our pages, living beside the Facebook icon...end communication. 

Design Concept: Hammer & Nail Simulator a.k.a SMASHY!

A few weeks back I lampooned the clicker genre as being a pseudo-game. To correct any offense I may have inflicted on dedicated clickheads, I am going to spend the next few weeks presenting little design blurbs for my own take on the genre.

In H&NS, you play the role of a hammer, smashing nails into planks in order to hold the together and build a massive superstructure. It starts out simple; you frame a wall, then 3 more walls, and then a rooftop for a house. But then you starting adding extra floors, towers, and incorporating steel beams. As the materials advance, the nails get heavier and stronger and require more and more clicks, in more specific areas, to drive them through and support the building. To add a bit of intrigue, each nail has a limited time-window to smash it in; while at the same time, being careful to get accurate, central strikes onto the nailhead is important for structural integrity. The game will remember little kinks in your nail-smashes, and as you progress through the game your tower will begin to teeter if you rushed. I guess eventually you go to outer space. As you progress, you can buy upgrades to the hammer, like pneumatic pumps and targeting systems...

but the most important, core principle, is the total mockery of the fact that ALL YOU DO IS CLICK.

VIRTUALLY 200 MILLION DEAD AND COUNTING...

I must confess, I am a murderer. No, I’m not a violent person by nature, quite the opposite. I work for the local Ambulance service part time. I care about people and their well-being for a living; very much. Treating symptoms, maintaining patient dignity and transporting them safely to the hospital is my primary concern. But when I get home from a hard days work, sometimes all I want to do is shoot something in the head and smash some dick-holes.

Loitering tends to lend itself to interesting conversation. One clear Spring, evening outside a local movie theater, I was speaking with some close friends after a particularly violent movie, ‘The Raid’ I think it was. “How many people do you think you’ve watched die in a movie?” I asked- reliving the darker moments of the movie. I noticed many furrowed brows at this question , “hrmmmm lots, I can’t count how many, thousands I guess, maybe hundreds of thousands!” This number surprised exactly none of us as we all nodded casually. “So how many people have you killed?”  I asked as a follow up question, this caused many more confused looks. ”Virtually I mean, how many people (or creatures) have you killed in your gaming career you think?” A good friend of mine replied with a wide and very inarticulate gesture. Palms up he guessed “uhhh, jesus, I dunno….probably millions.”

I do realize that the sensitive nature of this theme could easily regress into ‘game violence’ territory but I’m not going there, so lets just put that little baby to bed right now. My concern here is specifically with a ‘virtual death toll’ if you will. So how does one enumerate that? Lots of games like ‘The Last Of Us’, the ‘Call Of Duty’ franchise and many other first person shooters lately actually have that stat buried in the menu somewhere, it’ll usually say ‘Kills:’ and a number. But most games don’t count your dead so this will be an extremely rough calculation (and im being generous.) I’ll be using some artistic license with this math so please bear with me.

One night years ago when I was a young impressionable youth I was asked by the neighbours across the street to babysit there kids. When I showed up the little ones were already in bed and the father, ill call him Eric, was a massive computer nerd and was a programmer for ‘Reboot.’ He sat me in front of his computer and loaded up ‘Doom.’ When they arrived home some hours later I hadn’t left my seat I played that fucking game till my eyes were as red and pixelated as the eviscerated entrails of my fallen enemies. (I don’t even need to put up a screenshot  here I know you can see it in your minds eye right now, that’s how ubiquitous that game is.) So I was hooked, ravenous and thirsty for more, blood drunk you might say yet oddly satisfied and serene. I got my cool $15 bucks went home and slept like a baby.

But the first time I remember going “damn, I just murdered that guy” was in Metal Gear Solid for the PS1 (by this time i had plenty of ‘murder practice’ via the Sega Genesis, NES and SNES). At the dock in the beginning of the game after that epic opening sequence, where the first enemy is waiting. I clearly recall knocking on a wall, sneaking behind him and chocking him out until his little neck popped. Maybe this dude had a family back home? After that my virtual murdering career truly began.

I was going to exclude games from the Mario franchise because I thought that stomping a Goomba doesn’t really feel like your killing it. But that’s bullshit. I almost let the squishy-pop sound effects fool me. Beneath that Plumbers outfit and just behind the mustache lies an ice cold murdering psychopath, as calculating and remorseless as a contract killer. So I’m including Mario, and his whole damn family, as well as any game where you must (or choose to) eliminate an enemy. Just because Goombas guts didn’t blow out of its mouth and made a splat sound on the bricks when you stomped it doesn’t mean you didn’t erase the son of a bitch from existence. Very cleaver Miyamoto you almost fooled this one. I just want to include kills, where you have stomped, shot, stabbed, burned, poisoned, crushed, maimed or bombed an NPC or another player.

I’ve just spent about an hour doing some back of the napkin math for my career death count. I was going to do something like multiply my average games played per year with a reasonable average of kills per game (about 600) then multiply that by the number of years that I’ve been gaming which turns out to be about twenty-two-fucking-years! (omg what the hell have I been doing with my life) The final tally was something like 210,000. They say death in war is just a statistic. This number, I realized, was meaningless once I thought of a few unique cases.

In Mass Effect 3 there was an option to kill the entire Krogan race. This becomes a morally grey area, you didn’t actually physically kill them all but a choice had to be made for the greater good of the galaxy. The decision comes in the form of a cure for the Genophage. If you lie, which I did, and deny them the cure every Krogan in the universe become sterile. Effectively allowing the entire species to die out.Which is perverse. Being responsible for the Genocide of an entire race was unsettling and made me feel deeply ashamed of myself (for a time.) In fact I think there were several chances to do this; with the Rachni and with the Quarians. Im not sure of the numbers but  its safe to say they were in the tens of millions.

The final and by far the most obscene example I was reminded of was from a game from September of 2009 called ‘DEFCON.’ The subtitle of this game was ‘everybody dies’ or ‘the only way to win is not to play’ and it was a simulation I equated to the movie ‘War Games’ with a very young Matthew Broderick from 1983. (huh, my spell checker knew how to spell Broderick!?) In the game you are playing on a world map, you choose a country to defend, and the point of the thing is to intercept nuclear weapons and launch your own offensive. The most disconcerting aspect of the game is the dream like aesthetic. The deep neon colours, slow pace and depressing music accumulate to what I can say is a surreal experience. An average game gave me an absurd death toll of about 60,000,000 dead. I must have played 10 or so games since I got it. The death toll when I hover my cursor over  Mexico City says ‘13 million dead’ in a handsome and authoritative type font. Funny enough just seeing this number makes me feel much worse than if I shot someone personally. I quietly reflected on the lives lost before I high fived my buddy for dropping a 50 kiloton dick smasher on Moscow.

So I’m a killer, I suffer no consequence but that which occurs within the game itself. I die then I come back to life or I quit the game as I see fit. The remorse I feel is minimal. If I quantified my remorse as a percentage I would say my remorse level for any given kill count in a game is hovering around %6. That’s being generous, without real life consequence how can I feel bad about killing something? Im not there, I don’t know these people or non-people and they’ve been put here (usually) for me to dispatch as I see fit. The biggest joke here is that it’s not even free! We’re not forced at all to do this, shit man, we even pay just to be given the privilege of simulated murder. This is not conditioned reinforcement, I don’t drool or get a hard on when I see blood. I celebrate my victories shake off the shred of remorse I felt and go back to reality . Virtual murder, for me is the guise of therapy. Recently my lovely wife and I were eating dinner I guess I looked frustrated because she looked at me with those big green eyes and said to me ‘You need to relax baby, you should go upstairs to your man cave and kill something.’ And you know what I DID.

That same night outside the theatre I asked “how many people have you saved or brought back from the dead?” “including  necromancy?” another friend chimed in. “Sure necromancy counts.” I replied. “…..not as many as I’ve killed.”  he says with a smile on his face.

Tristan Mowat

Kills: 217,000,000 and counting…

In spite of all my clicks, I am still just a rat in a ... clicker game

The Monster Summer Game, Valve’s gamification of this year’s Steam Summer Sale is a self-proclaimed homage to the “56 trillion” gamers hooked on the newest genre of non-game to numb the skulls of players everywhere: Clicker games.

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Look, it's on a pixelated CRT machine! Charmed, I'm sure!

Non-games are similar to games; they involve some kind of activity, and usually some accumulation of points or currency in exchange for the activity, which can then be spent to enhance the completion of that activity. Non-games are linear, yet without end, and frequently invite you spend money to play more frequently, for longer bouts, or more efficiently. The chronology of non-games doesn’t go very far back; it has not been until recently that the leisure to game has become so widespread, that our leisure now also needs leisure. Non-games strike me as a syndrome of the iPad generation: minimum-input, take-anywhere, play-anywhere monetization shells. They are the pinnacle of casual diversion, designed not to stimulate the mind, but to stuff it up with cotton. Farmville. Proteus and Mountain. Clicker Heroes. These games would not be popular unless there were a significant group of people out there who either:

1. Game often enough that they seek much lower-impact gaming experiences between bouts of “proper” gaming;

2. Don’t play “normal” games at all but seek lower-impact fun / diversion.

I will admit, I prejudged clicker games based on mechanics alone. I mean, come on: nearly every PC game in the past 20 years has been a “clicking” game to some degree, insofar as clicking is a gameplay mechanic. Gaming intensity in RTS game is commonly measured in terms of Actions Per Minute - on PC the vast majority of those actions tend to be clicks. Having played Valve’s tribute to the genre today, I can testify that the clicker genre might more accurately be called “nothing-but-clicking” games. Aside from the 10-15 minutes I spent gradually lowering my mouse-arm off of my desk into a completely relaxed position in the crotchal area, and figuring out the optimal clicking rhythm, the game immediately became an exercise, and not a game. There’s no interaction or development whatsoever. Just an infinite highway of...more clicking.

Clicker Games turn their mechanic into a kind of engine. Not a game engine; rather, your clicks become the fuel powering an engine that propels you forward through the diverse audiovisual landscape of the clicker game. Much like browsing for porn in this era of recommended video sidebars, what you’re really clicking for is to see what you’ll be clicking next. In the Steam mini-game, you’re clicking on weird android-zombies named Greg and Lola until you reach a boss-level with a giant crab-arm pirate-tank who takes 10-20 times the clicks the previous goons did. The music changes. The target is larger. Then you click him to death, and it’s onto further, minor variations on the Greg & Lola concepts. Each day at 10am, the game resets, and the enemies & backdrops take on a new visual theme. There is added value, in that you're on a team with at least 1000 other players, amassing clicks to whittle down the enemies. But it sure feels like you're sitting there alone, pawing at your button, speeding down a road that turns in downward spirals. This is the Clicker Highway and I’m pretty sure it leads straight to hell.

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To the man with the battered mouse, six hundred MILLION BILLION CLICKER POINTS !!

I suppose it’s decent amusement, but as a passionate gamer, I acknowledge ethical design issues with regard to game like this. The Skinner Box - a Psychological experiment apparatus, containing a rat, a button, and a feeder-bottle of heroin-laced water - tends to produce fairly predictable results. Give it time to get hooked on the reward, and that rat will literally click that button till it starves to death (addiction studies in the modern day prove that what goes on in the Skinner Box is much more nuanced than that; but that’s for another article). Literally defined, this is learning. But nobody will argue that a rat’s experience of life is enriched by the Skinner Box. I direct this point back towards Clicker games. Any good game will consume your attention span. Battle arenas, epic quests, & sandboxes suck you in with their unique gravity; but at least they leave you with something to talk about and reflect on. Many games are games because the decisions made by players significantly affect the game-state, which motivate further decisions from the player. In a clicker game, nothing matters. Clicking barely even regards space-time as a thing that exists, for it traps the mind in the first dimension, teetering on a single pinhead-point of homogenous repetition. Much like Warhol-era pop art, Clicker Games insult the audience’s intelligence and the value of their time.

Step into the wild world of unethical game design, and this could be YOU !!

However, their popularity cannot be argued with, and this is a wave I intend to ride all the way to the bank. Keep an eye out Autumn 2015 for my first original Clicker Game, called Hammer & Nails Simulator, where players smash increasingly large and extravagantly decorated nails into surfaces of varying density and thickness. Hmm. Maybe I’ll just call it Smashy!

I'm still playing 'The Last Of Us' MP

Comebacks in this game are chest beaters!

 

I'm down to my last few bullets, i've taken refuge behind some dumpsters behind an abandoned restaurant near the corner of the map. Its myself and 2 teammates left against 10. I'm jacked! My heart is hammering in my chest as i wrack my brain for a good strategy for getting out of this alive. I can see the red bogies on the mini-map heading for me from 3 different directions.I check my backpack and yup, i got no parts to spend, cant even afford armor. I can see one coming around the corner...he passes me, i have the 'covert' perk and he cant see me! I lean out and brain him with my last few revolver bullets. Now they all know where i am....fuck!! Where the hell is my team??

Just as i'm about to get rushed and go down swinging my team shows up and shivs the guy from behind, he heals me (i had nothing left at all) and gifts me a molly (moltov). At this point i can't believe i survived that. Myself and the remaining survivors regroup at a cache box and we end up winning the game.

This game is the BALLS!!! and I think i've figured out what's kept me coming back to this game on the regular for years, across two systems, since it came out.

A lot of multiplayer games i just can't get into, maybe its my reaction speed, im 32 now and my fingers aren't as wizardly quick as they use to be. My cat like speed and reflexes are waning. MP games generally  move waaaay too fast for me to care about anything that's happening or the learning curve is so steep that i mid-as well be stranded and starving somewhere on K2 frozen and alone. So now i just don't even bother. Spawning and being instantly murdered no longer appeals to me. Hyping up a game with your friends by saying "Oh man, its a fucking amazing game....but the learning curve is pretty steep though" isn't an encouraging review.

What 'TLOU' has taught me is that pacing in a videogame is everything. One of the features of this game in particular that keeps me coming back is it's perfectly paced for me. I can breathe and think and work with my team.  I can duck out of situations that look dangerous and regroup someplace else. Crafting is intense, especially if you don't have the 'crafter' perk. You have to stop, press a button to take your pack off and physically make a Molotov with the supplies you've gathered during the round. All this is happening, usually, while you can see some asshole creeping up on you. The gameplay corners your brain into strategy mode by way of suspense.

The timing and spacing of this game allows for those tense moments. Naughty Dog has made a multiplayergame with consistent tension and they did it by simply slowing the game down and providing very few resources so as to cause the player to stop and thing about what to do next. Its simple, genius, and absolutely a pleasure to play.

Another reason i come back is the online community of players. Ive rarely me a group of people who genuinely care about playing as a team. Sure there's the stoned idiot every once in a while but he/she means well!?  A great example of a strong online community is when a new player happens to be on your team. Instead of 'noobing' him to death or leaving him to get dead most players will walk them through the basics or have them tail them to show them the maps. Its really cool i continuously see new, low level players online, its great to see the community still growing after all these years.

Ill leave you with a video from youtuber 'EatMyDiction1' of his games as an example of how gentleman play MP games and actually enjoy themselves. Pay attention kids this is how you have fun and work together.