Simulacrator

I’m constantly asking myself how my B.A. influences my writing. I can safely say that it has gone a long way towards knowing just how much to bite off in order to write. Read the rest of this entry »

I won’t ever update this money-sucking website unless I at least get half-assed, half-formed, half-finished posts on here. Or at least commit to that.

Some of my Tequila Donkey bros were watching me play Gears of War 3 last night, when Disco/Kevin happened to be playing with me/Hero Squad for the first time.  I think I can say, without much controversy, that Disco is a kill-nomming bastard. So it was that my roommates watched the kill-stealing, as well as encouraging me to troll. click here good sir.

This morning I read a Gamasutra blog post by Mathew Stone. You can read it: here. Its thesis is that Minecraft does not allow the player to relate to his home in the same way that a game like Morrowind does. Unlike Morrowind, Minecraft does not provide an experience that adapts to the way the player interacts with the world. For Stone, his Minecraft home is

“less of a house, and more of an enlarged closet. It’s where I keep my things. That’s it. It doesn’t exist without me. It’s dependant on me being there. There’s nothing to care about.”

I cannot account for Mathew’s experience of the game. If his mines and treehouses didn’t feel a certain way, no amount of internet-screaming will make him like it more. However, I can argue that there is an experience intrinsic to Minecraft that cannot be found in worlds like Morrowind, that cannot be punched and formed to the player’s liking.

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No matter how much I punch him, he still looks like a douche.

More than Garry’s Mod, Minecraft allows for an experience with a randomly generated world to take place. I say randomly generated world for lack of a better term, and I mean it in contrast to one like Morrowind’s, which is something much more scripted and planned than Minecraft could ever be. This isn’t a criticism of Morrowind. In fact, I say that if Morrowind allows a player to experience the medieval city that lives and breathes with or without the player, Minecraft is the experience of the ancient world, the uninhabited island that is untouched by technology. If Morrowind is the city, Minecraft is the forest.

Running a high-resolution texture pack.

It’s true that if you die in Minecraft you can start over and get back what you had before, but there’s a reason that the Creeper is the most hated mob in Minecraft. This is because it is the player that makes the environment, that comes to virgin land and punches it into its own image.  There are no tools, planks, or cake in the world that are not first made by the player. Though I cannot argue feelings into Mathew’s Minecraft experience, I can wonder how he misses the feeling of returning to one’s safe place after spelunking around during the day, searching for sheep to skin and trees to punch. When Stone waxes nostalgically about seeing the “tips of some of the buildings poking over some mountains,” I am reminded of seeing my own misshapen Minecraft structures standing awkwardly among the randomly generated terrain. At last, I have found that old emergency shelter I built a few nights ago; the door left open, and torches still burning.

This post has been a long time coming. In the comments section of an earlier post on characters in video games, guest contributor “The Cunt” asked if I thought that “poor character personality” could detract from the game as a whole. I’ll rectify the question a little here. Can poor character personality make a game worse as a result? Click to keep reading

Traci and I started playing Kirby’s Epic Yarn this weekend, and the first thing that struck us about the game is the thoroughly cute nature of the game. A warm, Winnie-the-Pooh style narrator reads aloud the onscreen text, which involves introducing how Kirby’s fatass swallow-everything nature leads to him getting shoved into a bad guy’s sock, where it seems that the game’s action all takes place in. I know when you click to read more.

I’m posting this note before I go to sleep (at 1:51, thanks Minecraft) to declare that I’ve given posting rights to Grant “The Cunt” Langlois. I’m sure the three of you who visit this blog will be up in arms or something about this.

This brings up another point: if you ever feel like contributing, please do. You may either do it on this blog as a guest post, or off on your own space, somewhere. Thanks and goodnight.

For some reason, commenter “The Cunt” requested that I write on ‘the importance of character personality’ in videogames. I don’t know why. I am also constantly scraping the bottom of the barrel for what to write about, so… Click to read on…

As you can see, this controller has two instances of the problem.

Whilst trolling the internets, I happened upon someone complaining about the Playstation 3 controller’s shitty triggers. While half the problem lies in attempting to call the R2/L2 buttons “triggers” (thanks 360), there’s still the issue that the fucking thing sucks. I’ll regret writing this someday. Click to read on.

I was informed by Kotaku today 8-Bit DJ Hero was released today, for the price of ‘free.’ You can read Mike Fahey’s write-up by clicking here. I downloaded it, played Mix 1 and Mix 3, and my fancy is quite tickled.

click to read on.

First off, for those who have not read the theory of “The Uncanny Valley,” go on and click here.

The Uncanny Valley is a theory which attempts to explain the phenomenon that as something artificial becomes more life-like, there is a sharp drop in our ability to appreciate this object. It often refers to robots that are created to simulate humans, i.e. androids.

I was thinking of a future post on Toejam and Earl, and it got me to thinking about the many terrifying aspects of the game. There are rape-y mailboxes that try to eat you, scary-as-shit doctors that try to give you AIDs, and jetpack Santa Claus. I remember many games that used to scare the young me, to the point where I would refuse to play them. Among them were some sort of detective game (where you have a flashlight), Doom, and even Wordmuncher. There was always something terrifying about the shitty graphics that reminded me of the image of death. Hell, even Skifree, with its skier-gobbling bear, sometimes unsettled me enough to play it.

Even today, the jerky, senseless, definitely un-lifelike movements of some videogame animations scare me much more than any life-like simulation could. I get the feeling it is related to the jerkiness found in characters like Samara of The Ring fame: no one really moves like that, and perhaps that is what is terrifying. The glitchiness of the videogame or computer breaks into real life, and starts to make life feel like the Matrix or worse: a bad dream. The nightmare of the poor simulation.