Gloam: Entry 1 – Day 2 – Status: Apprehensive

Gloam is the time immediately after the sun has set. It is the time when the light has fled. Darkness covers the land and the day is far off. In essence, gloam is horror. Rather, it is the beginnings of horror. It’s running-through-the-woods, trip-on-a-root, go-into-the-basement, check-if-he’s-dead horror. Gloam is my method for running RPGs.

Now, I’m not an expert on horror, but I do play one on the internet. If you’re here, reading this, then you’ve probably fallen for that cunning illusion. Let’s get down to it…

In this series of blog posts, I’m going to assemble some of my thoughts on running horror RPGs. Those posts will then be assembled on a page for ease of access. You can feel free to use any of the ideas you see here to improve (hopefully) your next horror table-top gaming experience.

Things to know before we begin:

Horror is a special kind of difficult. Much like comedy, it relies on timing, atmosphere, meaning, delivery and engagement to truly make an impact. All of those are important, really. Losing one damages the others. It’s so, so easy to screw up. It doesn’t take much. You know that tension that builds up in a room, that stress, that permeates the air in an awkward or dangerous situation? That’s the kind of tension you want to be able to create. Remember, also, how easy that tension is to break and, once broken, how difficult it is to pick up the pieces afterwards. It goes downhill pretty fast. However, that does not mean that your game needs to be all tension, all the time. In fact, that’s detrimental. See? It’s a special kind of difficult.

This is the reason why so many horror movies make asides for sex and comedy. They’ve got the same type of physiological arousal, but they have totally different tones. They let you stay ramped up, while also letting you relax. If you do all heavy atmosphere, then it’ll become routine. Routine, my friend, is the last thing you want.

Horror is about keeping people on their toes and guessing. Of course, this is just one way to engage. There are others, and we’ll cover those, but this will be your bread and butter for a horror role-play. You see, you’ve stepped into an intricate problem. Horror role-play is its own special kind of hell. Unlike video games, you’ve got every command a person can think of at their disposal. They can get up and walk away. They directly affect the atmosphere. If they’re not on-board, then it’s just not happening. Unlike movies, you can’t do jump-scares very effectively (although, I’ve got some tips on that coming up), you can’t sell yourself on gore or visual effects. You won’t (always) have a specifically-timed score helping you out. You can’t control where your audience looks and when. You can’t lock them into a story without a damn good character/player reason (We’ll talk about how they’re different later Pro-tip: horror is aimed directly at the player, but has to interact through the character. That’s your point of attack). Unlike a book, you can’t lock someone into a narrative or guarantee their attention at a scene. There are no do-overs. You don’t have control of most of the characters. Contrivances need to be subtle; your players will know if their characters are getting rail-roaded.

In other words, you need to re-think a lot of the methods that we’re used to seeing being used to scare people. We can still learn from them, and even use a few, but role-play is a whole different beast. Hopefully, you can learn a thing or two from my experiences and add a few of your own. Maybe, together, we’ll even create moments of true horror.

Getting Started:

Even a single night of horror role-play begins far before you ever roll a die. (Hell, you may not even use one.) First thing, you’ll need a group of good role-players. This is absolutely crucial, because, unless you’ve just gathered a group of people to tell ghost-stories to, the success or failure of your attempts to horrify will rely on your players. They need to be able to engage the story and the happenings within it directly and have their characters act like a person would in that situation. Here, meta-gaming will do nothing but melt your atmosphere. Your players can do it, and, hopefully, if you’ve managed things well enough, that will work against them (We’ll get to that part later, too. It’s my favourite). Because, your players will meta-game. They can’t help it, especially if you’ve really got them. Then, it will be their only escape. That’s why we’re going to head them off at the pass.

Okay, you’ve got your group of players. That’s excellent. Keep the group small. The more players you have, the more chance there is that someone will get bored, feel left out after they die (Oh, there will be blood), break character, break the tension, or just use player numbers to overcome your obstacles or atmosphere (a type of meta-gaming). Plus, smaller groups are much easier to organize and fit places (which will make more sense later).

The next thing you do is figure out what kind of story you want to tell. You’re going to need the What, Why, When, How and Where or things right off. Then, if you can, get a basic sketch of your players’ characters. You’re going to need all this information to craft a sterling experience. You want a certain unity of elements to help your players become absorbed by the experience. We’ll cover that in atmosphere, but, for now, we’ll cover why each of these things is important.

Who- Gives you the ability to write personalized encounters, story-lines and decent reasons why your group gets together. Work on creating character dynamics.

What- Knowing what’s going to happen will let you keep things theme-appropriate. Try for “what CAN happen.” Overall, this is the trickiest.

Where- Adds the proper flavour to your events. Is it a familiar place? Easy to visualize? Is it foreign? Is it classic horror? Massive impact on atmosphere.

When- Time of day, passage of days in game, anachronisms need to be weeded out. This is a good place to start your research, since a break in continuity can shatter atmosphere.

Why- Your players don’t have to know this, but (hidden) motivations will help you keep play consistent and events unified. Why DIDN’T it stab him with those scissors?

How- Knowing the series of events leading to your story will let you add, subtract and modify elements of your story on the fly, while retaining a unity of purpose.

Now that you have a loose out-line of the kind of story you want to tell and its elements, it’s time to get writing!

SPAZing-out on SPAZABH

Alright, hey, hello! So, today, we’re going to be talking about Space Pirates and Zombies and Bounty Hunters (Basically mercenaries). I picked it up because the recent pop-culture obsession with zombies has afforded me the excuse to include any number of unrelated titles in my blog. Ultimately, I’m looking for good horror games to write about, but it’s not in the cards at the moment. Perhaps, I’ll have to step back in time and review some older games. SPAZ (or SPAZAB) came out in 2011, so we’re not that up-to-date. Oops. Oh well.

SPAZ is a game that the creators put together because it was the type of game they wanted to play, as the intro screen is pleased to tell you every time you start it up. I have to admit that I haven’t played many games like it recently. The story is interesting to a point and the world it takes place in is pretty well fleshed-out. Suffice it to say, you’re on the edge of the galaxy and you want to be in the middle of it, because that’s where all the money is. The various star systems you visit are connected by warp-gates, which are guarded by the local UTA authorities. So far, so standard. However, the entire known universe has fallen due to a civil war of sorts over the frankly abundant resource pockets that dot the systems, so all the stars are disconnected. The only connected authority is the mercenary faction, whose presence can be felt almost everywhere in the entire… everywhere. It makes you wonder why they haven’t just taken everything over. Maybe it’s an allegory for capitalism, and they just don’t want to have to deal with all the administration bullshit. Each star is divided between the local UTA forces and the civilian rebels. Every star. To the point where it gets almost unbelievable, but we’re flying around in space fighting zombies, so who’s to say what’s believable any more. That’s the story, for the most part. The main characters are pretty likeable and, to be honest, they’re the only things that are going to pull you through past the five-hour mark. With that in mind, let’s move on to the rest of SPAZ.

It’s full of good ideas, but, despite pumping over 17 hours into the games, I don’t feel like it executes well on any of them. The story, for instance, is communicated almost entirely through dialogue and the odd thematic combat sequence. The dialogue itself only really serves to describe the reasons for the current fight OR send you on a galactic-scale fetch quest. Whee.

On the surface, it’s a top-down flight-combat, fleet-control game, but, once you peel all the layers away, it becomes clear that SPAZ is a resource management game. All of your missions and scenarios give you some combination of rez (the game’s currency), goons (the people you need to fly your ships), data (essentially exp for levelling systems) and reputation. Reputation is confined to a specific star-system, (unless we’re talking about the merc faction) and really only affects who will sell you what parts and what missions are available at a given star, so there’s no real weight to blowing up an entire civilian space station. Missions change over time in a star system. They’ll only be available for a certain number of “jumps,” then they’ll disappear. However, most systems only have 4 or 5 available mission-planets at most and most missions are available for around 7 jumps, so there aren’t any difficult decisions to make. Most of the time, factions will only provide you with missions if you haven’t been shooting them up lately, but, at the same time, that means that if you want to increase your reputation with them, then you’ll have to either start shooting at the other faction for a while or fly into their home base and hand over some goons or money. Of course, if you want to shoot at another faction, then you can’t just get your “fleet” to jump them. You have to use the one ship that you can control at a time to whittle down the shield of an allied vessel. There’s no ambush command. Even if you select and direct your entire fleet to attack, they’ll just sort of waltz with it until you’ve destroyed enough of its shield to show that you’re really serious. This can take up to a minute depending on shield strength, which really makes you wonder what they thought was going on during that time.

Though, even for a resource management game, there’s really nothing at stake. Goons and rez are easy to acquire. You just have to do a few missions and you’re golden. It doesn’t even cost rez to make jumps. Hell, you actually get rez and goons from making jumps. I’m sure this was designed to make it so that you’re never just stuck anywhere, but that also takes away the only conceivable use for actual mining (driving over space rocks in your buggy and getting a bit of rez), because mining is so laughably inefficient that it’s not worth the time. If you really want to make rez, then the best way is to do challenges for the mercs.

After playing through the game, it became clearer and clearer that the mercs were just tacked on, if their shoe-horning onto the title-screen didn’t already make that obvious. The game seems to want you to explore the galaxy, but if you destroy ships or do missions within a sector near a merc planet, then you’ll gain bounty. So, this adds a clock to every action you take. That, or you can go back to a mercenary planet and play their little combat-challenge mini-games.  These provide you with rez and rezpect, which cancels out bounty. However, for me, a big portion of the urge to explore was driven by the idea of finding new planets with new tech to buy or absorb through destroying it (You reverse-engineer spaceship designs by destroying them and collecting their black boxes). The merc mini-games kind of destroyed that aspect of the game for me. I mean, why would I bother testing out new ship designs or feel any sense of risk if I can just play the mini-game for free over and over again and make money at the same time? I think these challenges were added in to give you an easy way to make money and reduce bounty, as well as let you try out ship designs and tactics, but I lost too much of the potential of the game through them. However, the end of each challenge circuit gives you a special crew member.

Special crew members provide you with bonuses when they’re active on your crew. They also level up as your gain data while using them. Pretty straight-forward levelling system that nets you useful bonuses. However, you can only use a couple of them at a time and their bonuses are huge. I feel like more crew members with smaller bonuses would have provided more flexibility and customization. Also, how on earth is one crew member making that big a difference? Aside from the fighters, you main ship is bloody huge!

Ostensibly, the ships themselves provide plenty of opportunities for customization. There a many different types of weapons that play around with the mechanics the games uses quite effectively. There are scanners that you can mount on your ship that let you see the many cloaked units you’ll encounter. Otherwise, you have to find cloaked units by using a variant warmer-colder and spinning around in space shooting lasers everywhere. There are also tractor beams for picking stuff up more easily (a blessing, because the ships control like butter on a theoretical ice frying pan) and mods that buff other portions of your ship. However, you spend so much of the game out-numbered and out-gunned that you need almost every available port bristling with weapons to take out your enemies before they destroy you. At worst, it’s the illusion of choice. At best, it’s a mechanic that only becomes useful once your whole fleet is kitted out with enough large-sized vessels to accidentally have a port free.

Speaking of horrible controls, the game-play near the beginning of the game is a lot of fun. The smaller ships are fast and maneuverable and the enemies are, as well, so it’s a seek and destroy sort of game. However (and I’m saying that a lot today), the larger ships control like something you peeled off the bottom of a jet-engine that recently crashed at a junior go-kart derby. This makes chasing down the little buggers, which still get thrown at you late-game, by the way, all the more frustrating. The commands you can give to your wing-men are varied and sometimes clever. You can order them to eject their hulls so that they can get a boost of speed to escape, but you’re missing a few really crucial commands for the late-game. One of those, as I mentioned earlier, is the attack-I-don’t-care-if-they-like-us command. The ability to set patrol routes wouldn’t go amiss, either. The one that really irks me, though, is the inability to tell them to stay still and fire in one direction. Isn’t that a staple of micro-management games?

The inability to give a “hold” command doesn’t sound too important, until you consider the later enemies. One time, I was fighting a giant space station that had all three of my ships outclassed in terms or defense and fire-power. It literally regenerated health faster than I could damage it. So, I destroyed its escort, warped back to base and rolled out Base-Crackers. They had as many guns and output-mods as I could put on a ship without sacrificing its ability to hold people. The only challenge at this point was to sit out of range of the station’s guns and chip away at its health. My guns out-ranged theirs, but I needed them all focus-firing in order to make it take damage that didn’t heal instantly. My pilots must have been depressed because of all the bleak, empty space, however, because they all flew within the reach of the station’s weapons to take shots at it. So, I backed them up, one at a time, and went back to my ship. They just kept flying right in to get fried. There wasn’t much I could do, except cycle through them one at a time in the most aggravating, tiresome way possible. Finally, it died and took my ships with it, because they wouldn’t move out of the blast-wave and refused to take my commands as anything but suggestions. Oh well, I managed to save the ship I was controlling directly, any ways.

The galaxy you play in is pretty disorganized. It’s randomly generated, after all. That means that if you want to get all of the available ship upgrades, then you’ve got to fight your way through the lower-level areas that spawn all around the edge of the galaxy as potential starting-areas. Unfortunately, this also raises your bounty level, so you’ve got to either do challenges or bribe the mercs. Either way, you’re spending time freeing up the ability to explore. It’s like a pro-active Facebook energy system with a nifty wrapper. When you find a system with an upgrade you want, you’ve got to raise your reputation with the faction that controls it in that star system by doing missions for them or giving them goons. Giving away too many goons means you’ll have to do missions to get more, so you’re doing missions either way. If there aren’t any available missions, you can try the non-faction missions, which usually mean fighting that faction any ways, or faff about until the requisite number of jump-cycles has passed. Then, you’ll need money, but the lower-level areas aren’t going to furnish you with enough cash to go about your daily business once you’re at the point where you’ve broken the tech-level-barrier to the other lower-level sections, so you’ll have to go back and do high-level missions or more merc levels. Whee.

Do you see what I mean by good ideas poorly executed? Every portion of the game seems to get into the way of every other portion. The core game play is fun, even if the AI is predictable and lifeless. The music and voice transmissions that add life and character to the environment get repeated so many times that you want to find and blow up the transmitter. The missions quickly get repetitive, except when you run into the odd one that’s nail-snappingly difficult. If this game was shorter, it would be a lot more fun, but the massive randomly-generated galaxy demands exploration and time. Like I said, I poured 17 hours into the game. The first 5 hours, I thoroughly enjoyed. The next 5 gave me pause as I have all the ship designs ruined for me by merc missions and I got the haunting realization that earning rezpect was going to become a staple of game play. The last 5 hours were somewhat enlivened by the introduction of the zombies, FINALLY. I wish they had shown up earlier; it wasn’t going to take that long for me to grasp how to play the bloody game. They bring their own infection mechanic with them and make the marine ship-to-ship combat more interesting, but I was very low on interest by that point. The last two hours were a refresher for this review.

This game is cheap and it has good ideas. If you’re not too interested in finishing it, you might enjoy just tooling around the galaxy and exploring. Like I said, I thoroughly enjoyed the first five hours and that’s decent value for your money. Maybe you’ll even enjoy the things that I hated. Hell, I’m sure that a different play-style might make the controls and AI mechanics more serviceable. It’s not done, either. They’re still up-dating it. It did get released without the Bounty Hunters, after all. If an edition that major made it onto the up-date list, then maybe they’ll fix some of the problems I had here. They’ve really got to sit back and think about how all of their mechanics are interacting, though, because it’s a right mess in some areas. Also, record more audio tracks. Please…

-Transmission terminated under the authority of the UTA-

Finding Nirvana – A Trip to The Lobby

Hello again, dear readers. I know it’s been a week longer than I’d like it to have been, and I’d like to blame that on the birthday weekend I just had, but truthfully, I’ve been struggling a bit with the proper words to use. That, and a crippling addiction to Sonic Screwdrivers (Blue Curacao, Vanilla vodka and Lemon-lime soda, because I’ll always be a Tennant man). I know, I know, I should really be using my summer hours more efficiently, but we all need time off, right? Right. Let’s ignore the number of hours I spend playing games for this blog and the spin-off YouTube series I’m writing. That’s… that’s work ( >.>). Since I couldn’t think of a way to properly boil all this down to something pithy and worthy of a forgotten 200-word column in a newspaper bin somewhere, we’re going to try something new but stay within the boundaries of my trademark undisciplined style.

Last week, I stepped a little out of my comfort zone. I decided that, if I wanted to provide you guys with interesting content, I was going to have to try out some new things. From there, I got it in my head that it would be a good idea to try some interviews. Let’s keep in mind that I have no background in journalism whatsoever, besides a bout of my childhood that I spent training for the job should it be a requirement to become Spider-man, and dive right in to how this started.

As you may know, this was a blog I started to explore, criticise and deconstruct horror video games on narrative and mechanical levels. However, after a while, I realized that I was becoming a bit of a broken record. There were issues with the games that I was reviewing that couldn’t be explained by bad design alone. No, these were systemic. These issues were going to stem from convention. “But what conventions?” I would fret, “They were already in place in the earliest games I’ve played.” I thought on this and came to a conclusion. Unless there was a long-forgotten ColecoVision game from the Clocktower series, many of the conventions of horror games were going to come from horror movies (and books). A poor choice? Probably, games require their own style of thinking to craft. They’re primarily interactive experiences, after all.

However! You’ve got to start somewhere, right? Besides, there have been some decent games that use well-established television tropes. The Clocktower series is as close as you can get to Scooby-doo, while still having an 8 year old boy murdering people with 4-foot-long scissors involved. There was a Playstation 2 spin-off from John Carpenter’s The Thing that was pretty decent. There’s that Walking Dead game that only excludes itself from counting here because it involves zombies, and the day that zombies become scary again is the day they’re pounding on my door, demanding my tastier bits be highlighted in permanent marker. Oh, yeah, and that other Walking Dead game we’re just not going to talk about, because it sparks all kinds of silly debates. Why yes, I am going to skip over the terrible movie/show games and game-based movies, because we’d be here all day otherwise. The real point here was that I decided it was time to dive back to my roots and re-discover the horror movie.

Luckily, there was a cult-horror-movie shop right down from where I was living when I made the decision. Unfortunately, there was also a giant library of movies in my home that manifested from the collector instincts of a group of middle-class pop-culture scholars (Read: gamers). So, I coasted along on Silence of the Lambs and Silent Hill. Little did I know what awaited me down the block.

Now, I can be a bit jaded at times. Between my Steam library, physical console copies and retro games, I own hundreds of different game titles and I’ve rented far more than that. I’ve also had the pleasure of playing and finishing 90% of them, so cracking a new game is often an exercise in comparison. Since the industry tends to focus on certain practices, and because the limitless void space that gaming’s potential hints towards is kind of scary, I can usually figure out what’s going to go down before the first Bargle-wargle monster shows up to try to catch me unawares. Of course, it doesn’t take a degree from Free Time University to figure that out. Only so many games get put out each year, and they’re all exercises in massive risk-taking on the part of the company that puts them out, so we get a bit jacked on the variation end of the art-form. Movies, though… they’ve got a long, varied history, especially indie-cult classics. That brings us to the moment I decided to hit The Lobby.

I want you to imagine this with me. You’re walking down the street. On your left is a shoe store, then a daycare… and, attached to the daycare, recessed in the wall, is a little push door with a hand-made paper sign. There’s a small standee outside and a window wall-papered with print-outs of movie covers. Pushing open the door leads you to a staircase going down to another standee and a door going off to the left. Hesitantly, you trudge down the stairs. The door at the bottom gives off a subtle red ambience, almost as if its contents are eager to bleed into the outside world. Stepping across the threshold brings you to a concrete-floored room full of wonder. Pinhead stands to your right, shelves full-to-bursting with movies struggle to support their payload to your left. Another step in reveals the rest of the shop, bathed in the same red ambience, which you now realize is the light reflected off the shiny shelves, walls and couch. To your right is an alcove with a couch and a television playing a piece of horror movie history. A coffin shelf holds memorabilia, as do the walls, ceiling and floors. You are inundated. Saturated.  Every one of these movies is a new-favourite waiting to be played. “They’re all horror,” you realize with a grin.

At least, that was my reaction. It’s a veritable playground of new experiences waiting to be had. Sitting right at the back, past the shelves and wonder, is Kevin Martin. Believe me, if the store is open, he’s there. Kevin is the owner-operator of The Lobby. At first, I’d wondered how many of the movies in the store he’d watched, but, after a brief conversation, it became clear that the answer was all of them. He’s friendly as all hell, too, so I walked out of that first visit with an armful of recommendations. I couldn’t have enjoyed the visit more, unless I’d also been offered a job designing the new Silent Hill game, but that’s hardly Kevin’s fault. Several months and plenty more movies later, brings us to last week.

I knew that, if I was going to try interviews, then The Lobby was where I wanted to start. So, on the way to return the key to my old house (I’d just moved), I dropped off my latest cache of films. While I was there, I decided to ambush Kevin with the idea of doing an interview. I was trying to sound casual, but I was nervous. Then, he said yes and time slowed down. My brain screamed, “What the HELL are you doing?! You aren’t the least bit prepared! You’ve got a recording device, some paper and a prayer, what are you going to do if you screw this up? You’ll never get to come back here again. What if there are SPIDERS in your BAG, NOW? Wouldn’t THAT be fitting punishment?!” Still, I also knew there was another voice quietly whispering, “You know enough about how this works. You’ve got questions you’ve always wanted to ask. You guys have shot the shit before, just think of it like that.” Thus, we sat down on the couch, and I did my first interview.

Kevin, on the other hand, is an interview veteran. Besides owning one of the last video rental shops in the city, he also helps to organize and promote DEDfest, a cult-movie horror film-festival. It’s a time, let me tell you. His store is also being featured in a series of movies. You can check that out under The Last Video Store on CineCoup, or, if you just want to keep up on the news in general, you can join The Lobby’s Facebook group. So, he’s been asked a question or two.

Because I’m hopelessly predictable, I asked him about the fate of the movie rental industry. If you haven’t been suspended in cryogenics for the past couple years, you probably already know that many of the bigger movie rental businesses have shut their doors or switched to being whatever Rogers is now… some kind of amorphous mass of wires and connection issues. However, businesses like The Lobby have survived. When I asked Kevin about it, he said that it was thanks to his loyal customer base and serving a niche market. It makes good sense, after all, to not try and compete with the larger stores or Netflix. But, it also helps that he’s a devoted fan of the genre. I told you earlier that Kevin has -probably- watched all of the films in his shop and I meant it. This means that, if you’re looking for a particular type of scare, then he should be able to help you find it. There’s something to be said for coming in, looking at the titles on the shelf and having a conversation with someone who loves the movies you’re looking at. He doesn’t do late fees; his primary concern is that you get to watch the film. In short, ladies and gentles, this is someone who deserves our ear; he bleeds horror.

We covered a lot in the hour and some long interview, which you can find recorded here, but a lot of it came back to originality. Originality is at a premium in the AAA industry today. As Kevin put it, despite his love for big-name movies, this summer’s line-up… “Sequel, sequel, based on a book, based on a book, remake, reboot, re-imagining…” He’s pretty right. There’s nothing wrong with that, really. However, when he went to see The Hills Have Eyes and Evil Dead remakes, he admits to feeling like he’s been there before. The friends he went with loved them and he enjoyed them, which speaks to their quality, but I feel like there’s something fundamentally wrong there. The very foundation of horror lies in the imagination. Reboots are nice, because we shouldn’t be afraid to update old properties with the benefit of our future hyper-tech and they’re new experiences for some people, but what about people like Kevin? He’s a die-hard supporter of the genre, so he’s seen these stories before. Doesn’t the industry owe him the opportunity to experience that feeling of omen, that sticks with you for days afterwards, that comes from being truly affected by something new? Yes, I understand that they’re interested in up-dating and snagging new fans, and that it’s hard to do something truly original in an industry that pumps out ideas faster than a fire-hose spews kittens, but, if a large portion of horror is socially contextual, then old properties aren’t going to cut it, even for newcomers. It seems silly to think that copying something, instead of producing something, is a preferable risk in a genre that runs on sparking dreadful wonder.

Still, if you’re going to do a remake, then how do you do it right? I asked Kevin that very same thing. He seems to think that it rides the line between being respectful to the original idea and making it your own. I don’t want to spoil the plots, but Kevin provided a few examples of good remakes: “John Carpenter’s The Thing” (1982) and” The Thing from Another World” (1951), “The Fly” (1958) and “The Fly” (1986), as well as, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978). In these movies, especially “The Fly,” what you already know going into the movie may work against you. If part of horror is about subverting expectations in the spine-tingling-est way possible, then a remake should use what you think you know to scare the crap out of you. It’s like what SpecOps: The Line did by making you think you were stepping into another brown-desert-shooter and taking you on a psychological-thrill-ride. Maybe what we’re really crying out for is a Sims-style Silent Hill game where you play a white, middle-class office worker that grows old and dies in obscurity. That would be true horror in a world cello-taped together by social media. Still, up-dating new franchises is only one of the ways to extend the life of intellectual property. What about sequels?

Kevin says he has a soft-spot for sequels, “but only if the sequel continues the story-arc of the first one…” and isn’t just a sequel in name only. That’s something I can kind of get behind for movies, but many of my favourite games were evolutions of the original formula and mechanics in sequel form (Silent Hill 2, Far Cry 3). I guess a gaming-equivalent would be expansion packs tarted up to look like sequels (Crysis 3). We’ll hit up that particular topic another time, though. Movies are singular narrative experiences, after all. The story is our core engagement. That’s what you’re supposed to be getting. Unfortunately, as Kevin mentioned, a lot of the time, what you’re buying with bigger-name  franchises is the brand. That doesn’t mean that all sequels are like that, but when you consider things like Freddy’s Nightmares, House 2 (not about the cynical, fun-loving doctor) or Friday the 13th: The Series, that’s all you were getting of the original IPs. They traded off the names of the original series’ to attract an audience (See BioShock 2 for that particular sin in a gaming context). You can make a good movie that way, but it’s a bit misleading. This is where sequels and remakes diverge. Yes, they’re both using the same idea, but a sequel is a continuation. It shouldn’t just use the original as a spring-board to do something totally different. That’s what reboots are for.  Good sequels? Kevin gave props to the Saw guys for their winding, unified story.

Then again, he says, the big franchise he watched growing up was the Friday the 13th series (not to be confused with the Friday the 13th television show mentioned above), “the more, the merrier.” He equates his love of horror to a drug. I can definitely relate. Even though you know going into a theatre that you’re not going to totally enjoy something, you still go. You have to. It’s the same driving force that got me through Cthulhu and made me instantly want to rent Dagon, even though it was unrelated to it, simply to see what they had done.

As a horror movie junkie, it can be hard to elucidate why you love a movie, or even the genre itself. After years of watching horror movies, you can get a bit desensitized to the same old business. It’s a problem that I’ve run into, even as I’m sucking back B horror movies and indie games like a voracious frat-boy with a tray jager-bombs. I could only imagine what it was like for Kevin. So, I asked him what he wanted to get out of a horror movie now, years after he fell in love, “When it comes to horror movies, I want to be entertained, or [watch] a movie that resonates with me. If it scares me, [that's] even better…” That was something I really needed to hear someone else say. One of the scariest things for me has been losing my ability to be fully immersed in a horror experience, because I’m too busy studying the movie (fear of losing fear, how meta is that? >.< ). Kevin himself says that the edge started to dull a bit when he got into Fangoria magazines and the how-tos of special effects. Still, he finds the odd flick that still gets him. That, if nothing else, gives me hope that I’ll find movies that will once again rake my nerves over a smattering of red-hot razors and Lego bricks.

I’d recommend listening to the original interview, which I’ll link again for convenience, because I didn’t cover everything or do Kevin’s quotes justice. You really have to hear this guy talk about his genre; it’s awesome. So, track down your local cult movie shops, if you can. It’s not because it’s cool to buy indie or, even, local, although you’ll find arguments for both. No, for me, it’s because if you’re still running a business like that now, you love what you do. You love your subject-matter and you show it in your business practices. Kevin, and people like him, are more concerned with giving you a great experience than making a buck, so you can trust their word on the things they enjoyed. That’s where you’re going to find your next truly fantastic experience… It’s like Reddit in real life. Except that it costs money. Money that will go to fueling the industry making the things you also love. See? One big, happy, terrifying community.

Aaaand, we’re back! and It’s Already Meta

So, I was going to start this post off by explaining all the new changes to the site, but I included an explanation of all the new stuff on my “What’s All This, Then?” page. If you need to know, then that’s got you covered. Today, I thought, since I just launched Trivial Writing, we’d talk a little bit about what Meta is. I know it’s a word that gets thrown around a lot, but some people are still confused about it. Basically, “Meta” means “after,” “beyond,” or “self,” but, since that isn’t all that helpful, I thought I’d break it down for you in a gaming sense.

Meta-game is the hot word of the year in competitive gaming circles, and with good cause. You see, the meta-game is the game that manifests once all the other rules of the game are very well understood. It’s the game above the game. Take poker, for instance, more specifically, Texas Hold’em, because it was so popular for a while. Statistically speaking, there are “best-bet” plays, but any good poker player will tell you that always betting with statistics isn’t the way to win. In fact, it makes you very easy to read. Being easy to read is what loses you the meta-game, because, at the point where you understand the game well enough to be able to figure out what you should do with a hand, your real challenge becomes figuring out your opponents. You’re playing with a finite resource, money, so you want to strike when you’re going to be able to make the most of it. However, you aren’t the one that controls how much money gets added to the pot besides your own, that’s all up to your opponents. So, you’re going to have to get them to put their money in when it matters most to you. That means that you’re going to have to let some hands go or let other people fight over lesser sums. Good players will be watching what you do to try to figure out what kind of player you are. Simply put, you’re no longer just playing against chance (even though it’s a factor) or with the cards (Don’t forget bluffing), you’re also playing against the experience of your opponents.

I’ve got a theory that beginner’s luck is, partially, at least, aided by an error in estimation by experienced opponents. Essentially, they’re reading new players wrong because new players haven’t developed the patterns that more experienced players read. It makes them a wild card, and, so, they will often violate an experienced player’s expectations.

I know that Poker is competitive gaming, but it’s not usually what people think of when they say it, so let’s cut right to League of Legends. Since its release, LoL has absolutely exploded in popularity. Let’s leave the speculations to why for another day and focus on what the meta-game means here. Again, part of it comes down to reading your opponents. If a good LoL player sees a particular team composition, they can usually tell what kind of strategy that team would use in the game. This assumption is usually based off of experience and the knowledge of what others in the community are doing. It’s almost like an agreed-upon language. You’ll often see up-dates to the meta-game during large tournaments, because this is when most players will see the best-of-the-best exhibiting new or effective strategies. That information gets disseminated through the LoL community and, suddenly, there’s a new strategy floating in the ether for people to pull from. Another time you see swings in the meta-game is during patches, because the basic mechanics of the game get up-dated and new heroes get added. This creates new imbalances and encourages the use of one item or champion more than another. Some champions get kicked right out of the meta-game because they become redundant, ineffective, out-dated or buggy (I’m looking at you, Mort). I’m not going to give you an specific examples, because either it will become old news soon, or the names won’t mean anything to you, but that’s the basic idea.

I can’t stress enough that, to play with the meta-game, you have to have a thorough knowledge of the mechanics of the game, because the meta-game manifests from it. It’s all well and good to know which champions counters another, but, if you can’t play that champion, then it’s not going to matter. Basic mechanical knowledge is key. By that same token, once you have that knowledge, you need to feel free to play around with the meta-game. I know some players that like to stagnate in the current meta-game until someone else up-dates it, but that won’t bring you to the cutting edge of the game. That’ll just ensure that you’re always a good player, but never the best.

So, why is it that only some players end up making huge waves? Well, the meta-game is also tiered. The same way that there’s a meta-game above the basic mechanics, the meta-game has its own meta-game: a meta-meta-game. That’s probably as far as we should go, because you could end up saying meta for a while, and that’s just not helpful. Once you know the mechanics, and the current meta, there’s a game to be played in stretching the meta. Again, it’s usually the experienced players that end up doing this. Think of Chess. Chess is a game with an extremely extensive meta-game. There are hundreds of plays to learn and memorize, as well as counters and positions, plans and gambits, but that only makes you good. Once you become the best of the best, and you’ve got a thorough understanding of the game and it’s meta, then you start making up new plays. It’s been around for a long time, so it’s not a quick or easy process. Again, at the end of the day, though, you’ll be playing against your opponent. If you can convince your opponent that you’re doing one thing, and convince them to make the proper counter-move for it, then you can exploit it.

Sometimes, you’ll be playing against more than one opponent or team, though. The example I’m most familiar with here is Magic: The Gathering. If you’ve ever sat in on a serious multi-player game of Magic, then you know it’s not about mechanics, because everyone knows what’s going on. It’s not about decks or combos, because we’ve all seen them work a hundred times and can usually figure out what could happen with the colours that are being played. It’s a little bit about bluffing and playing with your opponent’s mind (one of the best examples of the advantages of unclear communication). However, fields of influence are the true deciders of these types of games. It’s all about what you can convince your opponent that you can do , so you can get them to do something that will convince another opponent of something else. Blue players (the counter-spell-heavy, tricky, rule-bending colour players) can control entire games with a hand of two cards, because opponents will often assume that those cards are counter-spells. However, heavily aggressive decks are often targets, because they have the ability to do a lot of damage early, especially to decks that take a while to spin-up. Combo decks often look unassuming, but can wreck your shit if they get their decks to work, so they usually try to convince people that they can’t do much in the early game. The game becomes less about the actual game and more about convincing opponents to make moves that work to your advantage and your other opponents’ disadvantage. This all comes from an understanding of the common moves and abilities of your deck and the ones you’re playing against. This all comes from a knowledge of the basic mechanics of the game. So, you can see how each level of the meta-games manifests from the ones being played underneath it.

It’s a teetering tower of knowledge. By extension, one small change to any aspect of the game can disrupt the entire established meta-game. In games like LoL and Magic, these changes come with new content releases and evolving combinations. In Poker, this comes from difference players with different reputations (This, of course, applies to the other two, as well). In Chess, well, it takes a large portion of a life-time to get anywhere near knowing all of the meta of the game, and, by this point, it’s all just considered part of the game, so, to any single player, there’s always a new meta to learn. The thing is, we’ll keep adding games on top of games as we go on. This can even apply to Tic-Tac-Toe, a game which has been, essentially, “solved.” We know every possible move and how to counter it based on whether you go first or second. However, how do you decide who goes first? Well, you could play paper-rock-scissors. You could leave it at that, or, if you know your opponent very well, you can consider what they usually throw. Then, in this given context, you can ask yourself whether they’d want to mix it up or just throw the usual. Then, perhaps, whether they’ll be thinking the same thing. Of course, you could bring it all back to a coin-flip, but, then, whose coin?

I was being facetious with that last bit, but you can see how deep this rabbit hole goes, especially since you’re not always going to be working with complete information. Sure, I may know the people I play with on a regular basis very well at one point, but what happens when they start playing with new people? What about on-line players? Sure, there’s an established meta in the case of LoL, but that doesn’t mean that all the other players are going to stick to it. A lot of the time, a strange choice will mean an inexperienced player with poor mechanical skill, but, what if it isn’t? Throwing your opponent off their game can be extremely valuable.

I may have made it sound like the meta-game is all about gaining an advantage, and, in the case of competitive games, it is, but that’s just what meta means here. In a broader sense, meta just means manifesting from elements below a level. Meta-humour, for instance, is all about jokes about jokes. One of the oldest examples is the “man walks into a bar” jokes. There’s a set of jokes where a man walks into a bar, orders a drink, hilarious punch-line. Then, there’s a joke where a “man walks into a bar…” as in an actual bar of steel. You see, that last joke is only funny because of our understanding of the first set of jokes. It’s a meta-joke, but, as it becomes used as a joke itself, it loses its meta-flavour, much the way plays in chess stop being considered meta once they’re off the cutting edge. This leads some people to believe that “meta” just means new, but there’s a very good reason for this phenomenon, at least, in my opinion. Think of this way, a meta-joke sort of assumes that we all know the other jokes. If you get the meta-joke, then the others aren’t funny, because you’ve heard them all before. Technically, one still manifests from the other, but they aren’t funny, so it isn’t really a joke any more. A good counter in chess will obviate the effectiveness of the moves that it counters, so they aren’t used as much. Once you learn how to counter a strategy, it doesn’t matter as much any more, so it falls out of use. So, its meta-understanding applies much less. Now, it’s no longer a manifestation of an understanding of the mechanics, because the mechanics have changed; it’s just another aspect of the general game that’s floating in the ether. Meta is, in a way, kind of a state. It’s ephemeral. It kind of obviates itself.

This is what prevents the game from getting too far away from itself (There are few meta-meta-meta…games… you get the idea). By the same token, there will always be meta-games; their definitions will just change. In Magic, you will always have basic mechanics. Those basic mechanics will always have strategies. Those strategies will always be used by players. Those players will always have to make moves. The minute you excise one of those elements, then the meta-game will change, but, then again, you’d be playing an entirely different game. You might not even be playing a game. You might just be flicking cards at a hat. But, whose hat?!

(Seriously, though, hat-size could make a difference depending on where you’re sitting.)

Any ways, that’s my basic introduction to meta. If you want a meta-introduction to meta, then, well, I think you have larger problems than I can solve here.

Complications

Trivial Punk will return on May 1st, along with several changes and an elaboration on those channel links that have been tantalizing those of you that look in the margins. I will also be opening up a parallel blog for my more literature-oriented readers. That’s all I’m saying about that!

Basically, between moving, finals and technological difficulties, I’ve been trying to write some new articles, but I realized that I should probably study for tomorrow’s final and the one the day after that. Right after that exam, I leave for the Calgary Comic Expo. I don’t get back from that until April 28th So, I figured that I’d get home and put some things together ahead of time for you guys, since you’ve been so patient. Thus, I’ll be back on the 1st with a new post and some new features. I can’t wait to share what I’ve been cooking up with you!

Cheers!
Trivial Punk

Finals season!

Hey guys, sorry, it’s finals season, and I’m moving, and putting together a research proposal, and, well, let’s just say that I’m swamped, so there’s not going to be much of an up-date today. Although, I’ve got some interesting stuff ready to write about for next week, and then stories of the Comic Expo for the week after that. This weeek… hmm…

I’ve decided to start delving into freemium games, because they seem like interesting beasts. One of my favourite aspects of games is how they tell stories. I’m really interested to see if there are any games that weave their freemium services directly into the narrative and atmosphere of their game realm. There are some pretty horrendous examples of the inclusion of micro-transactions and DLC in games, (See: Dead Space 3 and Dragon Age for particularly hilarious examples) but game design platforms that create whole worlds with the concept in mind are particularly interesting.

This summer seems to be the summer of the tabletop for me. I’ll be designing and writing several different types over the four short months between now and full-time school-work. It’s interesting to design and write with an entire range of possibilities in mind, but, also, incredibly over-whelming to balance. I’m going to be doing lots of research, obviously, but I’d be interested in hearing about techniques or success stories for successful story-telling.

It seems like I’m full of excuses this week, but I promise that it’ll be worth the wait :3

Cheers!

Evil Dead and Unrealistic Expectations of Blood-Loss

I’m, ostensibly, a horror game reviewer, but there haven’t been that many big, juicy targets pecking around the field lately to take pot-shots at, so I’ve just been making do with whatever scavenging game I can pick off from my comfy balcony in Manhattan. (Disclaimer: I don’t live anywhere near Manhattan). However, I realize that, even with my latest review up, I’ve got a perfect opportunity to talk about horror. Mind you, it’s not a horror game, but it is horror, so we’re on the right track.

Before we get down to Evil Dead (2013), I want to direct you to one of Chuck from Counter-Attack!’s latest posts about regimentally ordering games by their merit. I would say very latest, but he’s pretty prolific, so who knows what he’s churned out since then. Also, if you haven’t watched the movie, I’d say go give it a watch, despite what I’m about to say, it’s a pretty fantastic flick with an epic conclusion. Go on, I’ll wait…

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Welcome back! How was it? … Great to hear/sorry to hear that! When I went to see it, I was seated directly in front of a small child, so I was understandably worried that he might kick my seat and scream through it, especially given the fact that he kept telling his mom that he might end up screaming. Thankfully, he didn’t scream and he didn’t kick my seat… after I asked him to stop doing it in the first place. He learned, though, nice kid. The reason I bring this up is because he didn’t scream. I suppose he probably cringed, but he wasn’t brought to the edge of terror and, honestly, neither was I. While I have to admit that I grew up steeped in horror and lore, and that well made video games are probably more engaging in a horrific sense than movies, I still couldn’t see myself being frightened by the movie.

Oh, I cringed quite a few times. There were a couple scenes that were pretty hard to watch, actually. Well, no, but they made me grin through the anxiety they provoked, especially the scene where the one girl cuts off her arm with a meat saw. Then, there was the scene where the girl is carving her face with a piece of glass and you can hear the wet, sloppy sound of a rough edge cutting through flesh. Masterful scenes of cringe, let down only slightly by the obvious prosthetics they required, but you can’t really blame them for not cutting their own arms off; they would have passed out half-way through or bled to death. Aha! Herein lies the crux of my problem with this movie: the characters.

The script was alright, and many people liked that they actually contrived a reason for them to stay out at the cabin this time, but the characters all shared one problem: they were tough as fucking nails. I’m not complaining about their personalities, because those were alright, I’m talking about the amount of punishment they could take before they started to care. Some of them honestly didn’t react to it and, when the character on the screen isn’t passing out from blood-loss, then I’m just not feeling the consequences of the actions that took place. There are many emotional components to good horror and one of them is a sense of the consequences of actions. You got us going with the actual damage, part of us actually feels a ghost of the percussive force or physical pain, so you’ve got us anxious. All that remains after that is a sense of what happened to the character afterwards. Oh. Whoops. Let me recount to you some of the damage that one of the characters took: he smashed his back on a toilet, got stabbed with a needle, got stabbed with a long piece of glass, got shot with nails from a nail-gun in the arm, chest and leg, got wailed on by a crowbar, had his hand decimated by same crowbar, and was finally lain out by a stab wound to the stomach from a girl possessed by Satan. Holy crap! That guy was a tank! No… he was a skinny high school teacher.

You see what I mean? Any one of those things would have sent a regular person into some sort of shock, but he was up and about smashing heads with the best of them. Okay, he was acting injured, but not as injured as he was. Adrenaline can do a lot, but it doesn’t block out all pain, and it eventually fades. He wasn’t the only one, either. Maybe desecrated sites naturally increase endorphin flow, but I like to think it’s more the result of having a limited cast. You’ve got to make each member of your victim-list last, otherwise no one really has a personal journey to anywhere but a meat shop. It still takes some of the effect out of the effects, though.

The male lead, if you can call him that (it was kind of an ensemble), was a bit thick, too. I understand the emotions and trauma that were affecting him, but that’s no excuse for being wilfully ignorant of everything going on around you. This happens until the other half of the good/evil dichotomy strikes a tree with lightning and he suddenly becomes uber-competent… if still a bit stupid. Dude, if the chlorpromazine didn’t do anything the first time, there’s no way it’s going to work when she can float on water. I’m really curious how he thought things were going to work out when he went down into that basement… whatever. Anyway, that’s the second problem I have with the film. Everyone was a little too good at everything besides staying alive; they lacked some humanity. Sure, one of them was a nurse, but the male lead dude was able to rig up a defibrillator from two needles and a car battery. I get that he was a mechanic, but he performs some serious triage over the course of the movie (with duct tape, hilariously enough) and seems a little too good with that shotgun. Then again, he was a mechanic, so some of that makes sense.  His sister is equally skilled, once she stops being possessed, in many others areas. I think it’s just the whole family.

They just didn’t feel human. One of my friends put it this way, “What do you expect? They’re horror movie protagonists; where they’re supposed to have organs, they just have more blood.” That’s all well and good, but I would have gotten out of the house when it was obvious that it had recently been broken into by a murder cult. Clearly, your sister shouldn’t be detoxing in this particular environment.

The rest of the movie was alright and the climax was excellent! (Pro-tip: Stay after the credits on this one) I just didn’t feel like there was much weight to many of the events, especially after one of the guys appears to murder his girlfriend in the bathroom and no one really suspects anything, but they still don’t seem to think the Satanic cult thing is a serious problem. Pick one! Either they think there’s something going on or they don’t, but you can’t have it both ways. Real people have emotions and make silly decisions, but they’re usually consistent and not script convenient. Also, if you want to scare us, stop panning around and screeching on violins before something is about to pop out. I know that music can help build tension, but over-exposure to anything makes it predictable. We’re pattern-reading animals, we’re going to get the message.

I hope this hasn’t spoiled too much, and if you think it has, then go see the movie anyway. It’s worth a watch, if only for the experience. Besides, it’s an Evil Dead movie, we kind of know what’s going on here already. Just sit back, relax and enjoy the splatter.