LIVE from Chicago, it’s Masters of Unlocking’s first anniversary episode! This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the first-annual Cartridge Club Con (C3) in Chicago, Illinois. We delve into Chicago’s rich history in gaming, including developers based here, games set here, and historic gaming events that occurred here.
Show Notes
Epic Set List:
Discussion of what games we’ve been playing recently & our spoiler-free thoughts
Octopath Traveler (Nintendo Switch)
Steamworld Dig 2 (Nintendo Switch)
Sunset Riders (SNES)
Zombies Ate My Neighbors (SNES)
Looney Tunes Basketball (SNES)
Pickups:
We discuss our recent gaming-related pickups and scores – what did we pickup on our trip to C3?
Main Event:
Caleb & Scott celebrate their trip to the first annual Cartridge Club Con by diving into video gaming’s history in Chicago.
We dive into a slew of gaming stories – Microtransactions, Google’s rumored console, gaming corpses, Nathan Fillion, ESPN & Overwatch , controller mods, Neo-Nazi scum, sex disorder, Fallout: New California, and more! Plus we preview the Cartridge Club’s upcoming Chicago meetup!
Show Notes
Epic Set List:
Discussion of what games we’ve been playing recently & our spoiler-free thoughts
Pillars of Eternity
Horizon Zero Dawn
A Profound Waste of Time (magazine)
Pickups:
We discuss our recent gaming-related pickups and scores
What’s News:
Why should we care about a Google video game console?
Family of slain teen has viewing with him propped up playing video games, surrounded by his favorite things
Even more indie games are coming to Nintendo Switch
Nathan Fillion finally plays Nathan Drake… is it any good?
ESPN/Disney ink exclusive broadcast deal with Blizzard for Overwatch League
Neo-Nazis using online games as recruiting playgrounds… in case the internet didn’t already suck enough
First video games, now Sex… is there anything fun the WHO thinks is good for you?
We learn which member of the iconic 1990’s trio TLC “Hey Past Caleb…” had the hots for
Score 1 for Anti Microtransactions – Middle-earth: Shadow of War is now microtransaction-free!
8bitdo releases kits to mod your classic OEM Nintendo, SNES, and Genesis controllers with wireless bluetooth
Fallout: New California fan mod receives thumbs up from Bethesda
Guerrilla Games is growing
Main Event:
Caleb & Scott are headed to Chicago for a Cartridge Club meetup (July 27 – 29)! If you’re in the Chicago area, we’d love to say hi! Drop us a line.
Welcome to Burning Books. I’m Caleb, and I want to help you love video games even more. Sometimes I do that by reviewing books about video games. Today is one of those sometimes, because I’m taking a look at the first issue of A Profound Waste of Time. (more…)
Welcome to Burning Books. I’m Caleb, and I want to help you love video games even more. Sometimes I do that with game reviews, which is what you’re here for today. This is Game’s Over, a series where I give a few thoughts on a game as soon as possible after playing it. This video is short, quickly thrown together, and certainly rides emotional high or low of whatever game I just finished. If you are new to the channel, I offer plenty of longer, more thought-out videos, so subscribe to stay updated.
The credits are rolling on Horizon Zero Dawn. Yes, I’m late to the party. This game was released about a year and a half ago, but being late to a game doesn’t make the experience or the game any less amazing. And Horizon Zero Dawn is amazing. (more…)
In my previous video I explored a concept I call ludo anthropomorphic dissonance, which aims to explain the tension between the realism video game players want from their enemy characters and the lack of realism players need from their enemy characters. I used an example from the Playstation 1 game Tenchu Stealth Assassins. Enemy guards in this game are inept. They can be lured from their post by a ball of rice that appears out of nowhere. But more importantly, they don’t question the rice ball’s origin. Real people, when seeing a strange object fly through the sky would question the object’s origin, not its destination. (more…)
By now everyone knows that Toys R Us is officially dead… but could it be rising from the dead with zombie-like ferocity? We discuss the juicy rumors of TRU’s potential return, the WHO’s creation of Gaming Disorder, a new Nielsen report on the gaming industry, and more! (more…)
I was thinking about AI in video games, specifically the artificial intelligence that governs NPC and enemy behavior…more specifically the NPC enemy behavior in Tenchu: Stealth Assassins…MORE more specifically the NPC enemy behavior that causes inept guards to abandon their posts to chase balls of rice on the ground. What kind of idiot guard is so willing to ditch their security responsibilities for edible litter!? The correct answer is of course the same kind of goldfish-brained idiot guard who isn’t concerned that the ball of rice wasn’t there just two seconds ago.
But taken outside the context of the questionable security guard hiring practices in Tenchu-land, there’s an interesting dissonance here that I’d like to explore. I want to talk about the tension between the human-like enemies and their purported human-like actions, and I want to explore the limitations that we as players require of our enemies. A truly intelligent enemy NPC is not what we want. We don’t even want artificial intelligence. We want scripted behaviors based on shortcut heuristics with game balance–not realism–being the end goal.
And to be fair, enemy AI in video games is a bit of a misnomer. True artificial intelligence implies machine learning, and video game enemy artificial intelligence is really, as I said above, just a collection of scripted behaviors that account for a bunch of different enemy states. For example, if player is within x pixels of enemy, then enter the hunting state. If enemy’s health is below y%, then enter the flee state.
But back to Tenchu and why I felt this scene with the dumb enemy chasing down a ball of rice was so funny. This is where the dissonance I mentioned earlier comes into play. Because we recognize this character as human, we are encouraged to expect human-like behavior from it. And chasing a random riceball is not human-like behavior. So, it’s funny. This exemplifies what’s called the Benign Violation theory of humor: Things are funny when they subvert our expectations but only when they don’t hurt anyone. This guy isn’t a real person, so, nobody was hurt.
But what if this enemy character looked even more like a human? Then, chasing the rice ball would elevate from simply funny to hilarious. Let’s visit Metal Gear Solid and the series favorite disguise: the cardboard box. Realistic looking enemies. Convincing enemy behavior. Absurd cardboard box disguise. Hilarious.
It’s just a moving box, guys…nothing to see here.
But, interestingly enough, because of the realistic portrayal of the human-like enemies, our laughter is curbed slightly. Benign Violation is tampered when we’re meant to be invested in what’s being harmed, even if only superficially. That’s why laughing at a news story about mass murder is sociopathic behavior. And maybe why bullies who laugh when they make kids cry should be taken to therapy.
But gamers demand so many conflicting things. We want realism, but we also want enemy AI to respect our need for fun, meaning we don’t want our enemies to be super smart. We need our inept guards to eat discarded poisoned rice balls. We need our machine gun-toting soldiers to ignore a conspicuous cardboard box. Otherwise, the game wouldn’t be fun.
What I’m talking about, this dissonance between how we feel a human-like character should act and our need for human-like characters to not act human-like is less an uncanny valley and more an unfun plateau. NPC enemies are allowed a generous range of displaying human-like characteristics, but once the NPC enemies become too human, too unpredictable, too smart, the fun would decrease very quickly.
To be fair, I cannot think of a game that is too realistic–in terms of human-like characteristics on NPC enemies–to be fun, so this concept is truly just conceptual. If you have any examples of games that might fall off this unfun plateau, please let me know in the comments below.
The unfun plateau highlights one of the many conflicts game designers have to wrestle with. And part of me credits the longevity of pixelated graphical styles in games to this dissonance and perhaps why PS1 and Nintendo 64 era limited polygons may never have the same shot at life beyond their initial generation. I’m not so dumb as to think nostalgia won’t trump all, but I’m careful to think this ludo anthropomorphic dissonance isn’t strong.
Clips from the following videos are used in this video
8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
