thedeadparrot

I always forget the annoying/bad parts of PAX every time I go back. The lines. The too many people. The orgy of consumerism. There's plenty that I enjoy, too, but man, there's plenty that I hate about it.

Here's an incomplete list of things I played and enjoyed. Mostly so that I don't forget them later.

Game I Tell People About When They Ask What I Saw At PAX

Elsinore - Do you ever experience Hamlet and ask yourself, Man, if only Ophelia were stuck in a time loop that she could only escape once she stopped everyone from murdering each other? Well, do I have a game for you. The build I played was still relatively new and filled with minor annoyances (omg, slow the fuck down so I can talk to you. so I went to the place and then did the thing, now what?). But I do love time loops as a mechanic, and I do love Shakespeare, so this is right up my alley.

Game That Is a Sequel to an Indie Game I Like

Steamworld Dig 2 - Stemworld Dig is such a pleasantly tight game. You dig your way through the ground, collecting gems along the way, and then making your way back up to the surface with your loot when your bag is full. This seems to be more of the same, though I'm a little worried about how some of the magic may be lost once it gets bigger. I also need to play Steamworld Heist which is very different mechanically, but also looks like a ton of fun.

Game That I Really Want to Play More Of Right Now

Ticket To Earth - There's apparently a storyline that goes with this game, but I didn't get to see it in the demo I played. It seems like a pretty fun tactical RPG designed for mobile devices, with the 'twist' being that the floor is made up of colored tiles. You can only walk on one set of colored tiles per turn and walking on those tiles charge up your special abilities. It was pleasing to both the parts of my brain that enjoy tactical turn-based games like XCOM and the parts of my brain that like Match-3 games.

Game That Compelled and Confused Me In Equal Measures But Hopefully Won't In the Final Version

Moonlighter - Both a management sim and an adventure-y dungeon crawl? The Dungeon Crawl parts were excellent and delightful. I didn't get the management sim parts, but that might be because it needs some more polish and/or explanation? The art is lovely and I stuck with it so long I missed texts telling me to meet up with my friends.

Game That Has an Adorable Slug-Cat in It

Rain World - I am not good at this game, but it was pretty, and I enjoyed watching other people play it.

Game That Is Basically Monument Valley, Which Isn't the Worst Thing in the World To Be

Where Shadows Slumber - Instead of weird 3-dimensional Escher-like manipulations, you have a lantern and manipulate shadows. Not as inherently awesome, but the devs were super open to feedback when talking to them, so hopefully the final product will sparkle.


Other things I did/saw:

Utility Kilts Booth - idk why, but this delighted me. Kilts! But functional ones! I'm sure it has a very specific niche and I'm happy for them.

Escape Room panel - I haven't really done escape rooms, but my friends wanted to see this panel, and I'm glad I did. It was fun to listen to the panelists talk about the struggle of being in a fledgling industry. I definitely need to gather people together to attempt one.

So I played The Beginner's Guide, which I will need to spoil in depth to talk about with any sort of coherence, but if spending 1.5 hours on a loosely interactive experience that tries to talk about the relationship between the creation of art and the consumers of art told through a very odd metatextual story about a guy who makes video games through a bunch of small video games, well, you should pick it up (in the latest Humble Bundle!) and then come back and read this.

Or you could read this and spoil yourselves. Either way.

( Thar be spoilers )

So I ended up reading Second Quest, which is a lovely comic about Zelda (the video game series), an interrogation and deconstruction of it. I want to like it more than I do. It's written by the guy who wrote Saving Zelda and it's drawn by the guy who did the art for Braid, and that was definitely more than enough for me to be willing to give it a shot in the first place.

I love the idea of a feminist examination of Zelda and of the video game tropes that animate it, and the comic definitely takes a good stab at it. But there's something about the execution that doesn't quite resonate for me.

Maybe it's that my expectations were too high. Maybe it's that I'm comparing it (unfairly) to what I've seen fic writers do with problematic canons (hell, and problematic fannish tropes!) and how they poke and prod at it until they've cracked it wide open instead of just tipped things over a bit. Maybe it's that I'm unfairly comparing it to Broken Age, which has similar themes and has more time and space to explore its ideas. But it feels like a shallow, lumpy experience. Parts of it feel too drawn out. Parts of it feel too rushed.

I like the main character Azalea, but she's kind of your standard Plucky Girl Who Walks Away From Omelas kind of archetype and doesn't go much further than that. There are pieces that reference Zelda lore and mechanics, but that feel kind of half-there, not fleshed out enough. The trinkets, for example. The bird companion. Her relationship with her father.

This is a lot of griping, though, and it's a lot better than I'm making it out to be. It has something to say and it articulates it in a cool way. The art is gorgeous. There are plenty of moments of pure wonder. It's jam-packed with interesting ideas. But there's also something frustrating at the center of it, and not in the good way.

So this was my first PAX East, a huge fan-focused gaming convention that happens in Boston every year. I've been tempted to go before, but I've definitely been intimidated by the crowds and the general tone of gaming discussions online before.

This year, I decided to go mostly because my coworkers goaded me into it, and I'm glad they did. But I guess I'm feeling ambivalent about it, too.

The Good:
- Lots of games everywhere. I liked the energy of the place, that we were all there because we love games in all their various forms. There's nothing quite like a gathering of nerds.
- Being able to awkwardly fangirl some studios/devs there who have made games that I really liked in the past and were making cool games again in the future. Mostly. It was generally me being like, "I really liked your game." and them being like, "um, thanks."
- Running into random people that I wasn't necessarily expecting.
- Introversion-friendly areas with lots of beanbags and power strips for charging your cell phone/handheld gaming device.
- Seeing other people wearing the Gaming's Feminist Illuminati T-Shirt.

The Bad:
- The heat was kind of unbearable. The crowds were intense. I had to wait in line for 15 minutes to get into the convention hall on Saturday.
- While mostly without visible douchebaggery, there were definitely a few assholes here and there.
- The few panels I went to were pretty meh.

The Ugly:
- I guess one thing I wasn't expecting was the orgy of consumerism on the expo floor. I've only really been used to the low-key indie-focused gaming festival that goes on at MIT every year. The Indie Megabooth was basically like that, lots of smaller lower-key games showing off their wares at their own short tables. But the rest of it? Hoo boy. I'm someone who can deal with Times Square without getting too bothered by it, but this felt like a constant, neverending assault on my senses. So many screens everywhere.
- Plus, I am still totally confused by who goes to PAX to buy their computer hardware.
- Though I did totally shell out money for merchandising, so I guess I can't say anything.

Title: The Heroes' Journey
Fandom: The Legend of Zelda
Characters: Link, Zelda
Length: 1:44
Summary: It's dangerous to go alone.
Music: Jim Guthrie - "The Maelstrom"
Footage: Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, Minish Cap, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword
Notes: In order to get all this footage, I used several Let's Plays as source material for this vid. I'll link to them in the secondary author's notes.

Streaming (Youtube)
Download (MP4, 100MB)
Tumblr
AO3

( embedded and notes, omg, so many notes )

but that's not even worth it.

I still love video games. It's what I've been doing instead of writing or being a responsible adult over the last few days. Hooray.The Humble Indie Bundle 12 is out, and you should get it because Gone Home and Papers Please are great, even though I still haven't finished Papers Please /o\.

Also in /o\, I got good beta feedback on my fic, but I am ignoring actually working on it in favor of playing video games. Whoops.

I'm glad the story about Anita Sarkeesian's harassment is making the rounds, but I have to say that it's only the tip of a very, very large Shitty Video Game People Iceberg that has been ongoing for weeks now.

I haven't really posted about it, because for the most part it's just been horrifying in the 'I can't look away' sort of thing. There's a pretty lengthy post up on Badass Digest that covers more of the angles, and ironically enough, was written up before the death threats towards Sarkeesian were made.

A lot of gamers have been pulling the #NotAllGamers and the 'this thing happens to everyone famous!' bullshit. I've been in a lot of internet communities over the years, and I've seen them blow up in all sorts of interesting ways, but gamers are by far the most horrifying I've seen of all of them.

It's not all hopeless, of course. A lot of prominent video game developers have acknowledged Sarkeesian's criticism as a clear call to action to do better. Women are consuming more video games every year. The lines are being drawn in the sand, and I think most people know which side they'd rather be on.

In some ways, this whole thing does remind me of RaceFail, a necessary bit of throwing down to clear the path for people to think better, write better, create better. Leigh Alexander, one of the better-known female video game journalists, wrote a marvelous piece about the end of 'gamers'.

We can only hope.

I haven't posted much here because of busy-ness -- work-busy-ness and life-busy-ness (omg, who would have thought that buying property would be a lot of work?), but here are things that I have been thinking of:



Snowpiercer! I saw the movie this Thursday with friends. I feel like, after reading some of the reactions online, people either have really positive or really negative reactions to it.

I'll try to keep my own thoughts brief and spoiler-free. I think I fall into the 'positive' camp overall, but that's not without ambivalence and caveats. There's good acting, great art direction, and tiny bits of interesting and fun worldbuilding that is like crack to my brain. But overall, it's heavily metaphorical in ways that highlight the weakness and inconsistencies of the premise rather than papering over them and making them palatable. There's a dreamy fairy-tale quality to the whole thing that's at odds with its attempts at gritty honesty.

Overall, I think the best thing I can say about it is that I would like us to have more movies that are like this. Movies that are ambitious and wild with their ideas and unafraid to push them to their limits, even if they do fall down a little at the end.



There's this game article that I read a while back, Games, Noir, and the 17%, that has stuck with me. Not because it's about this particular game (L.A. Noire) but because how it addresses the way women have disappeared from our media and how we have become accustomed to being disappeared, not just from the foreground, from the leading roles, but from the background as well.

Er, I don't feel like I'm explaining this very well. Just go read it.



World Cup final tonight! I am less excited about the game itself and more excited about my super swanky cream soda, chocolate-covered peanut-butter-stuffed pretzels, and the homemade meatballs my friend promised to make for me. Nomnomnom. The only that could make this better is chicken wings.

Also, how much do I love that the US team is known as the USMNT? SO MUCH.



I have spent a lot of my free time video gaming. XCOM is like crack. Oh look, aliens! Oh look, aliens go boom! Watch me as I cackle as my sniper headshots a fun-loving muton IN THE FACE. Watch me curse as my assault trooper misses hitting a stupid drone thing with its shotgun! So much tasty turn-based wackiness.

I love Broken Age.

It's hard for me to say whether or not this is because I backed it a while ago and have been obsessively watching (and rewatching) the fantastic documentary that is being produced as game development progresses, showing the ups and downs of making a complex and ultimately subjective system for the delight of everyone to see. It's a really fantastic documentary (though not available at the moment for purchase) and I love how it's about adults sitting in a room and talking about things and also about making really beautiful things.

But this isn't about the documentary. This is about the game.

I'm not someone who has nostalgic feelings about Tim Schafer and the old school LucasArts adventure games. I once tried to play Monkey Island as a kid and got stuck and bored and gave up on it, and that was pretty much the extent of that experience. I only got around to playing Psychonauts a year ago when it came out on Linux. I've enjoyed plenty of adventure games over the years (omg Machinarium <3), but I have no particular attachment to the old ones.

Broken Age is a modern adventure game, for better or for worse. It's slick, and it's streamlined such that I never hit a point during the game where I got frustrated enough to look up a solution on the internet (trust me, that's happened more times than I can count). It's gorgeous beyond belief and crafted with loving care. Just see for yourself.





But where the game really shines, for me, is the story.

There are flaws, of course. The main characters are draw thinly, but fairy-tale-thin not typical-video-game-protagonist-thin, and since this is Act 1, there's plenty of ways for them to go towards becoming fleshed out. The worlds they inhabit can feel a bit spare at times. The goofiness of video game logic continues to hold throughout the world.

There's something magical about its central theme, though, about teenagers becoming adults and what that means. As you can see, there are two main protagonists, a boy and a girl, and I suspect it's more unintentional than intentional, but there's something about the way their stories contrast against each other feels surprisingly feminist for a story constructed almost entirely by white dudes (trust me, I've seen the documentary, I know).

Vella has been chosen to be sacrificed to a monster that likes to eat girls during the Maidens Feast, and everyone around her talks about how great this is, it's an honor, etc. The game takes the darkly humorous tack of making most of the other maidens super eager to be 'chosen' by the monster, talking about the perfumes they wear, the construction of their clothes, whether it's better to be skinny or fat, and I guess, talking in Valley Girl accents. Vella has already decided this is absurd and upsetting, of course, and is ready to make her escape. This does have the weird, uncomfortable effect of making many of the other female characters around her seem shallow, vain, or downright stupid. But it does, in a lot of ways, remind me of being a girl who liked jeans more than skirts, who thought Barbies were boring, who grew up angry that boys got all of the cool things. There's a lot of effort put into impressing the giant unfeeling monster who probably actually care about the unrealistic and arbitrary demands being made on the maidens. Everyone buys into it. No one questions it, because 'that's the way it's always been.'

Shay, on the other hand, is living a coddled life. He's the only living thing on a spaceship that's been designed for a five-year-old. The ship's computer lovingly puts him into fake adventures where he has to survive hug attacks and deal with ice cream avalanches. Until, well, someone mysterious shows up in the ship and offers him the chance to go on a real adventure. I feel like there's some interesting deeper meanings here, in how we teach our boys to be heroes but not how to be adults. There are very real consequences to Shay's adventuring (which I will not spoil here), ones he cannot see because he lacks the ability to see past his own selfish desires. I think I see that at times in my male friends, the realization that they can't be the gung-ho hero who can do whatever they want and get away with it.

The ending of the first act is a pretty killer cliffhanger, and I'm sure these half-baked ideas that I have will either play out more fully or fall apart once we get to see the rest of these stories. Who knows, man. Still, at the end of everything, this is an experience that has stuck with me for a bit, and I expect it will stick with me just a little bit longer.

I don't think that Anita Sarkeesian puts together the most entertaining and incisive arguments in her videos about awful, sexist video game tropes, but I really do enjoy the amount of polish that the Kickstarter campaign has bought her, and I look forward to watching more.


Jeez, that Ms. Pac-Man commercial is awful.