Brindle Blog Thread

[Sulkdodds]

This is a blog about videogames.

It written by John Brindle, who is a fictional character similar to me, and who will in time be joined by other fictional characters similar to other people. Some of you may have seen the link at the bottom of the CS:Go interview Glenn and I did and wondered what this is all about. It is not about reviews and news of videogames. It is about videogame criticism. What is videogames? How is videogames? Why is videogames? Do you dare to find out?

What have people been saying about the blog?
"An exercise in futility" - Critical Distance
"This writer went out on a limb to find the nit-pickiest of details" - Nawara_Ven, Reddit
"I am not Sulkdodds" - John Brindle
"I am not John Brindle" - Sulkdodds
"A TOUR DE FORCE FOR DE SENSES" - Lewisham Mother's Weekly

I hope you enjoy it and hope this is an okay forum section for it to be in. Questions and comments are welcome.
Here are some links and quotes:
(I will be updating this thread)

Content List

• 'A Family Game' (Left 4 Dead and brindled gameplay styles)
• 'Consider the Unicorn' (Robot Unicorn Attack and what it says about games criticism)
• 'Notes on The Marriage' (why Rod Humble's abstract indie game subverts itself;sexism??)
• 'Where the Line Leads' (Black Ops as a 'passive-aggressive' game, and the slippery slope)
• 'Groping and Touching' (how smartphone UIs take a leaf from gaming's book to create 'feel')
• 'The Assassination of Rockstar by the Coward John Brindle' (why Red Dead is too much like GTA)
• 'Review: Infantry Combat' (a choose-your-own-adventure provokes thought but fails as a military simulator)
• 'First Person Problems' (how shooting is not the only thing first person can do)
• 'Automatic Gardens' (the treadmill-like play and pointless exploitation of Plants vs Zombies' Zen Garden)
• 'A Very Brindle Christmas' (the time Ma and Pa Brindle begat an evil plan to gamify Christmas)
• 'Teaching the Camera to Lie' (the 'unreliable narrator' of Amnesia, and its unique use of first person)
• 'The Thief's Inheritance' (what dedicated stealth games do that nothing else can)
• 'Moral Psychopaths' (how Blizzard's earnest but idiotic community policies are political correctness gone soft)
• 'ART IS A FLACCID PENIS' (a novel contribution to the are-games-art debate. Exactly as title suggests)
• 'Sneaking on the D-Pad' (the place where MGS and Pac-Man intersect, and what we can learn)
• 'I Will Eat You And Everything You Love' (consumption in Metal Gear Solid 3; response to previous)
• 'Reality is Beastly' (where retro platformers meet 13th century heresy in a damned, deadly world)
• 'Conference Report: GameCamp' (John Brindle visits and assesses the GameCamp 'unconference')
• 'From Cyberspace to Composite' (changing fantasies of cyberspace in two hacking games a decade apart)
• 'Good Question' (a critical examination of the work of indie game dev Pippin Barr)

Excerpts

Either way, this continual switch of roles from victim to saviour is what weaves a ‘team’ together: limping, wheezing, and undergoing an unwelcome insight into how dogs see the world, a player on her last legs is necessarily the object either of others’ charity or of what she would call their cold-hearted betrayal and I (cocking my rifle, turning away) would call necessary pragmatism.

Now, I’m not trying to cast myself as the one who points out the emperor’s penis. Everybody knows that he's naked and his dick is flapping about in our faces - hell, that’s why we like him. In other words, pure ludology is inadequate to deal with such games, because they are primarily remarkable and generally loved not for their formal systems – the rules of the game – but for the supposedly irrelevant representational elements.

No wonder it feels dysfunctional. One moment it clings to your arm and demands pernickety drudge-work to prove that you’re making an effort, and the next it’s pointedly ignoring your attempts at communication in favour of its own script. Certainly this neurosis stems from anxiety over the act it has to follow: Treyarch’s Call of Duties have always been the runts of the family. Rocked during development by Infinity Ward’s acrimonious divorce from Activision and stricken with guilt over its secret joy at being the publisher’s new favourite, BLOPS juggles deep-rooted envy for its sister games’ fireworks with a continual terror of player abandonment.

Your Wife, Your Daughter, You, and My Dick

 

[ríomhaire]

Can I deny being John Brindle's brother James Brindle? I'm totally not James Brindle.

 

[Eejit]

I've had it confirmed by reliable multiple sources that Joaquin Brindle does not, has not, and never will exist.

 

[Sulkdodds]

I'm afraid there is already a confirmed absence of 'James Brindle'. Other names I can neither confirm nor deny.

 

[Krynn72]

Advertising your blog is one thing, but advertising someone else's blog? That makes no sense.

 

[Sulkdodds]

What can I say? I'm a generous man. For example, there's a new post up, and I'm not even charging you five pence per word to read it. It's called 'Groping and Touching' and it's about the similarities between smartphone UIs and videogames; it ends by proposing a remote-groping application for lovelorn perverts on trains.

What intrigues me, despite my trepidation, is the leaf the Android developers have taken from the book of videogames (Biblical apocrypha removed in favour of Deuteronomy over fears it would have a bad influence on teenagers).

 

[Sulkdodds]

After a wee break, here comes The Assassination of Rockstar by the Coward John Brindle, or, Three Design Failures in Red Dead Redemption. It's a response to an article by Lee Kelly a couple weeks ago (WARNING: ENDING SPOILERS), which expands and deepens that other dude's critique of RDR to (attempt to) show how game mechanics inherited from GTA are inadequately adapted to the wild west setting that their art assets, writing and voice acting try so hard to create.

Honour has to do with social perception, and measures your standing in the eyes of others (it does not rise or fall as long as you hide your identity). So in whose eyes is this honour calculated? Those who believe that the Bible equals civilisation and that the indigenous peoples are ‘savages’? Those who believe that civilisation is a crock of shit? Or the perceptive innocents like Bonnie MacFarlane?

 

[ríomhaire]

Although I agree with pretty much everything said about RDR but I found this line a bit up its own arse I must say "How Red Dead scored so highly on critics’ measures while dragging these contradictions across the New Austin desert is difficult to understand."

No it's not. Despite the thematic problems it's still a really good game with a decent story. The various elements may not always work together very well (or at all) and despite these flaws it's still an excellent game.

 

[Sulkdodds]

But it's a frustrating game because of those contradictions - I feel like I'm constantly being ignored or admonished by the game. It's also flawed in so many ways it was irrelevant to mention. The way when you enter a mission trigger you instantly start a mission, without having any choice, even if you're on a mission at the time, and sometimes the mission triggers are right in the middle of roads...the way sometimes when you get killed by the law you die and restart, and sometimes you go to prison and lose all your money (which is pointless and boring)...the way the movement controls are borked while trying to walk around on trains...the way you die instantly when you accidentally stray into a few feet of water...the way they just straight-up couldn't be bothered to roll with the possibility that the player might use the freedom given to her. These aren't things that completely ruin the experience, but I don't understand the "BEST GAME EVER" praise that (as far as I can see) was heaped on it. Also, I'm getting some really frustrating bugs (e.g. the horse that heeds my call constantly switches between the horse that's mine and the bad, lame EVIL HORSE). I suppose that stuff wasn't in the article, but basically it's a game which makes me go "Oh COME THE **** ON" about once every 15 minutes.

 

[ríomhaire]

Oh wow you really needed to vent a bit didn't you? Sorry D:

 

[Sulkdodds]

It's super serious and people will die.

 

[Sulkdodds]

This week a review of John F. Antal's Infantry Combat, a choose-your-own-adventure book billed as an educational tool for soldiers and for citizens interested in military matters. After writing the book, Antal went on to become an advisor to the Brothers in Arms stories. InfCom turns out to be an interesting failure:

InfCom could be renamed The Many Deaths of Davis for all it bombards you with hot phosphorous. You are walking through the valley of the shadow of death; death is all around you, and you’ll step in it if you don’t wear wellies. Some decisions cause instant destruction while most lead only eventually to inevitable defeat, but there is little scope to recover from mistakes. The majority of paths are actually traps from which there is no escape – though this may well reflect the reality of warfare. Certainly you will come to fear Section 58. Spoiler: it’s the one where you get vapourised in three sentences.

 

[ríomhaire]

Oh yeah I want to say something about RDR: I think two of the worst moves for the game were regenerating health and magic horse whistling. I really thing the game could used a survival element. You end up in a shootout in the middle of the desert and you're badly injured and your horse is dead. To heal you must kill an animal and get some meat off it (which will go bad after a while) then find a safe place to build a campsite before you can cook the meet and heal (and fast-travel). Also the guns shouldn't have been so accurate over such long distances so that you'd have to actually stalk the animals you were trying to kill instead of picking them off from a mile away. I think that would have made for a much better game overall. Also, no infinite magic horses.


As for the CYOA book. It was an interesting post to read but I'm not sure I can deliver any sort of opinion on it.

Also, it takes light less than two hours to reach Saturn.

 

[Sulkdodds]

Yeah, I like the horse-whistling mechanic but it would make more sense if it only worked within a certain radius, so if you get off your horse and go round the corner you can summon it to escape, but not if you end up on your own in the middle of the desert after falling off a train. In the game's current form, removing the whistle would make things tedious, but it would be pretty cool if there were survival concerns.

Silly error re Saturn: fixed! Well, sort of. Pseudo-fixed.

 

[ríomhaire]

Wolfram Alpha can make anyone into a scientist:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(distance+to+alpha+centauri)/(speed+of+light)

 

[ríomhaire]

I was reading this and I thought of you: http://www.next-gen.biz/opinion/opinion-games-cant-tell-stories

Comments?

 

[Sulkdodds]

I will repeat here my comment on that site:

Of course games can't tell stories - if you choose to define 'story' as 'everything a game can't do'. You seem to have picked a handful of narrative methods and placed them within the circle of 'story' while filing all other methods under 'storysense'. It seems absurd to propose that what developers can create through methods you endorse does not count as a 'story'.

This would be problematic enough, but I don't think your claim that games can't 'do' these elements has much merit. Your arguments boil down to the idea that since games cannot COMPLETELY control certain areas of player experience, they cannot be said to use these methods as storytelling. It is the Ebert fallacy - that storytelling is impossible without total control - and it ignores the idea that, in establishing the conditions of the player's story, the game can condition its final shape.

(and while we're at it, the idea that games can't do stories because players don't pay much attention to them is really silly - would games 'not do' multiplayer if a significant number of people didn't bother with it? do games 'not do' endings because few people reach them? This is exactly the kind of thing Ian Bogost talked about in 'From Aberrance to Aesthetics')

In your article on the difference between interaction and participation, you define the former as "making, changing, breaking or otherwise manipulating what you see so it becomes something else." But a player acting within the bounds of a game's ruleset does not actually change the game - she capitalises on options the game has provided (whether by developer intention or not). How can you place emphasis on the rules of play and then claim games 'empower' purely with reference to the fantasies they simulate? Modern Warfare lets you kill a lot of people but it would be hard to argue it 'empowers' the player on a ludic level. It may legitimately empower them on a psychological one, though this depends on whether the verb 'empower' is used to refer to the creation of a feeling or the proposition of a particular kind of relationship.

By your definition, only modders, hackers and speedrunners actually interact rather than participate. And in the latter case there's no clear distinction between changing the 'text' and simply exploiting opportunities that were present in the system but were not seen.

Ultimately I think you're mistaking a problem of competence for a fundamental what-games-are issue. 'Game developers sometimes choose to deliver stories in boring or shitty ways and therefore games can't tell stories'. In fact, I agree that Heavy Rain and LA Noire are not the way forward, that they don't make significant steps. And I share your irritation with the spurious dead end of reaching after capital-A-Art by trying, badly, to mirror other media. But I don't see how any of that leads to this expansive fractal snowflake of no-true-scotsman fallacies.

I don't remotely understand the distinction the author makes between 'story' and 'story-sense'. And at bottom I wonder if he's just going for the age-old "player choice means you can't tell stories because the player could run around in circles" canard. Which would be disappointing.

 

[Viperidae]

Yeah, that article is pretty spot-on-stupid.

I wanted to write a piece on how player's telling stories to each other outside of the game is an artifact of the greater overarching narrative that players create out of their own emergent game experience (see any free-roaming RPG thread, for example), but I couldn't be assed. Also, a large part of my argument would have been concerned with explaining how more or less flexibility in the game's world and interactivity makes this self-player narration more or less possible, but RPS already did it way better than I ever could.

In my view, storytelling in games is heading down two opposing paths in this industry: either the player is a role filler and plays to conform with the developer's plan for what the story is going to be, or the player is the role creator, and the game world reacts to the way the player behaves.

But to argue that games have no story... especially in that developers have no control over the story (?). I seriously don't know what he's talking about by the '4 key components of a story' being time, hero (not necessarily), viewer powerlessness (??????????????????????) and full attention. Someone enlighten me.

Hey, can we repurpose this thread as a discussion of video game theory?

 

[Sulkdodds]

Don't see why not! As long as I'm allowed to ramble incoherently here rather than on the blog where all things must be PERFECT AND WELL-FORMED.

Earlier I referred to the problem of player choice as a 'canard'. It's not a problem per se because game design is all about managing player choice. But, at risk of contradicting myself, I think many games have now made it a problem in their efforts to impose narrative control along filmic lines. For a developer trying to make sure everything goes absolutely correctly, player choice becomes a problem rather than an asset. Reviewers of the latest editions of Uncharted and Modern Warfare have said these games actually push you around, with characters that shove you into the right spot or weird ghostly invisible hands that make sure you get your jump right.

 

[Viperidae]

Yup, that's why I'm decidedly uninterested (perhaps to a snobbish degree) in such games and the direction most big-blockbuster devs are taking us. But when I mention games that allow an almost chaotic level of player-world interaction, people are usually turned off by either the game's obtusity or difficulty (cf. Dwarf Fortress and Arma discussions). Morrowind was fantastic in this respect (as are any 0-mainquest RPGs). I'm about to give Skyrim a whirl from the good things I've heard about the player's independence. I'm hoping it will be a good balance of user-friendly and user-left-alone.

 

[ríomhaire]

Dodds, would you place Portal 2 into the same sort of badgering as MW3 and Uncharterd 3? (what's the usual abbreviation for Uncharted?)

It's a very linear game (even the puzzles seem more guided than the original) and there are even two places in the game where if try to place the wrong portal on a surface (which would otherwise result in your death at high-tension and climactic moments) the game fixes it for you and pretends you placed the right one. It literally won't let you make that mistake (though it will let you die if you simply don't try to place any portal at all).

 

[Sulkdodds]

No, I don't think I would. While Valve's SP shooters are structurally similar to Modern Warfare, Valve are simply better at manipulating the player to do what they want. They guide the eye and draw attention with level design, lure you with goodies and health packs, frustrate you with barnacles and duff machinery and basically muck you about. What they don't do, for the most part, is slap you around the face with what they need you to do. Ludic railroading is the exception rather than the rule. Conversely, as I wrote in 'Where the Line Leads', incidents like Shoot the Hinges reveal a kind of insecurity on behalf of Treyarch about whether or not the player will actually do what they want. If RPS and Simon Parkin are telling the truth, railroading is endemic. One of the key criticisms in RPS' recent review of MW3 was that the player is not allowed to open doors - compare this to Valve's approach, where if something critical has to be done it's usually the player who instigates the next plot twist by plugging something in, turning something on, or indeed pushing a sample into an anti-mass spectrometer.

Plus, Portal 2 has a much more playful attitude to player disobedience. The copious script penned for its NPCs offers a reward for waiting around and doing nothing. Special easter eggs and extra Wheatley lines - rather than endless repetitions of "shoot the hinges!" await the player who refuses to play by the rules. There's a clear awareness that players will choose to mess around and a willingness to engage them if they do. Not to mention that Portal 2's puzzles for the most part leave you alone to solve them at your own pace.

In fact, sometimes the game has too little badgering. Remember those little 'chase sequences' where you're told to run frantically along gangways and walkways? It's transparently obvious that nothing will happen if you dawdle, and as a result they lose a lot of their agency. Compare this to what probably remains the best run-while-things-happen-to-you sequence in the FPS genre - the escape from the sinking ship in Modern Warfare's first mission.

Valve games share a lot of structural principles with U3 and MW3 - you might call it a common purpose*. But if that's the case, the difference between them is one of means rather than ends, i.e. how skillfully they fulfil that purpose. 'Badgering' is a crude method for making players do what Valve makes them want to do, and ludically railroading them (i.e. NO DO NOT FAIL) the last refuge of a control freak.

Basically, I'm not actually against linear story-led games. I just demand they be done well (though I question whether their design principles, in a wider sense, might not be a dead end).

*(perhaps not: the other games are unashamedly filmic, whereas I'm not sure Valve's intention with Episode 2 or Portal 2 was in any way to emulate movies...)

 

[Sulkdodds]

Oh yes, and behold! for this week I have for your delectation or possible indifference conceived and birthed in the sight of almighty God an article about basically how the evolution of the FPS has left behind a lot of interesting possibilities for what developers could do with a first person perspective. Basically how 'shooting' is just one thing first person is good for which has somehow become the defining element of all first person gaming.

We can glimpse an alternative future in Brothers in Arms, a first person shooter with the intriguing design innovation that you can’t easily shoot the broad side of a barn door. By drastically widening the firing cone of the player’s weapon and giving ‘cover’ objects almost magical properties of protection the game bypasses the Call of Duty effect (where emotive strings and solemn quotations about conflict accompany the lesson that wars are won by individual heroes who land satisfying headshots on a hundred enemy soldiers each).

 

[ríomhaire]

Reading now (am I the only one that does?) and the link to Wolf 1D is broken. You/John put in an extra "/d" at the end.

Edit: And in the following paragraph says "wars are one." Proofreading man!

Edit2: Interesting read. I was a bit taken aback by how much it went into your hypothesized alternate universe because I didn't realise it was going in that direction. There was nothing wring with such imaginings, just now what I was expecting. Your ideas are interesting and I certainly like the idea of more limited games and ones where you are actually one among many rather than a superhuman who saves everything and well I'm really bad at commenting on things so yeah.

 

[Sulkdodds]

Sure, loadsa people are reading! I got like 2,500 hits from the Sunday Papers the other week.

And it's really only two paragraphs in the 'alternate universe', I just like to big it up with sci-fi trappings. But as far as I know the closest thing anyone's done to that generalship game is Sacrifice, which is fantastic, but A) is third person, and B) has a very low unit count. It does mean the player has to use their own person as a resource and make sure they themselves are at the right place on the battlefield at the right time, which is difficult because you often have to nip back to your base to summon monsters personally. So it takes a little dimension-hopping to see how the RTS could be very different.

 

[Sulkdodds]

This week: Automatic Gardens, or an examination of the strange pointlessness and exploitative treadmill-like gameplay of Plants vs Zombies Zen Garden minigame. It also examines the dynamics of automation in the game and how PvZ players seek to reward themselves with not having to do anything.

Here, ordinary game design has been inverted; instead of fixing a bad interface for the player’s benefit, the developers make you work and pay for a better one. They know that one day on your journey to big bucks you’ll log into the game, notice the teardrop icon hovering on the main menu, log into the Garden and stare at the wall of plants all screaming to be watered click by arduous click. On that day you will either quit forever or you will say to yourself: **** this, I’m buying a ten thousand dollar watering can.

 

[Sulkdodds]

After a break for Christmas and the shitstorm of work that preceded it, and before we get too far into 2012, here's a slightly late but undeniably seasonal post that goes into some Brindle family history. It is the story of two very bad people who came up with a plan to turn Christmas into an evil game - and of how Christmas would be very different if it had different rules. It is not quite what I usually post, but if it's not to your liking, normal service will resume shortly.

http://brindlebrothers.blogspot.com/2011/12/very-brindle-christmas.html

The rules were simple: three teams would compete in three separate areas of Christmas preparations, with one handling the tree and decorations, one cooking the dinner, and one mixing the drinks (a task very much the equal of the others in the Brindle household). Each would follow a list of objectives laid out by Tom and carefully balanced by Ma, specifying in what fashion they were to complete their duties.

The twist was that only the winning teams would get the presents. To ensure our motivation, a ten-dollar minimum was introduced for all parties, and sharing, returning or re-giving gifts after winning was forbidden; we were to submit our receipts for ceremonial burning on the 18th. The final and implicit rule was: like hell were either Ma or Tom going to lift a damn finger this year for a bunch of sentimental little twerps.

...

It took several of those blows before the head came clean off as a bloodied projectile. I wiped my forehead with the back of my palm, only really serving to smear the blood smattered on my face. The body spasmed a bit in the cold clear light and the sight sent sympathetic shivers straight down our spines. I guess that's when I started to think it wasn't going to be a very good Christmas that year.

 

[Sulkdodds]

So lately I've been playing Amnesia, and though I haven't quite completed it yet, it struck me it was exactly the kind of game I was advocating for in First Person Problems. So this is a post about the clever things that Amnesia does with the first person perspective: how its insanity system creates an 'unreliable narrator', and how its monsters make looking itself a very dangerous act.

As in all good horror, the player is forced by her desire for safety to voluntarily risk her own life. In this way the ‘insanity’ referred to in the plot also becomes a fundamental part of your player character, your being-in-the-gameworld (what David Lake calls your imaginary job description). Instead of being able to take your abilities for granted, as in most FPS games, you are effectively disabled, forced by a protagonist short on spoons to consider every situation in light of his mental health. Madness is your constant companion – a metaphorical counterpart to the “shadow” that follows Daniel from Africa.

Caution is advised: while I am careful not to spoil the story of the game, I do talk a lot about the mechanics. Reading this article before playing Amnesia for the first time might therefore make the whole thing less scary to you by rendering it less 'unknown'. Traveler, you have been warned.

 

[ríomhaire]

Guess I'm not reading this one then.

 

[Sulkdodds]

How could I forget? This week was an article written for Sneaky Bastards, a newly-launched stealth gaming blog. I'm going to link you to the redirect post on my own blog, so they can't sneakily track the link back to here and find out who John Brindle really is, but you should really check them out as they have some rather good articles.

The article is called The Inheritance of a Thief and argues for the continuing value of 'pure' or dedicated stealth games by identifying three crucial elements of the genre that aren't often found anywhere else.

Metal Gear Solid was praised on release for the atmosphere and beauty its lush maps squeezed from the ageing PlayStation processor. But this was only possible because each one was roughly the size of two tennis courts. It didn’t matter; the necessities of stealthy play forced a slow pace which masked their tiny size. Writ in the grammar of stealth games is a level of caution, both on the level of player verbs and of play objects. Slow modes of movement like crawling and creeping are essential to success, while common obstacles like guards, traps, cameras and noisy floors force you to pay careful attention to the environment. Avoidance tempts players to explore the world in search of secret routes, while observation demands they examine it carefully.

That link again!

 

[Sulkdodds]

Following my current tradition (?) of forgetting to post stuff until way after it's up, here is a fairly opinionated article about Blizzard's swear filters and their approach to preventing community strife, which is simple-minded and causes more trouble to them than it's worth. Make sure to read the comments for some stunning examples of swear filtering from other games.

Last month an old comrade got in touch to report her discovery that Blizzard had banned the word ‘black’ from all guild names. Apparently somebody decided that in the racial powderkeg (?) of the WoW community, even the mere mention of a colour – which happens to be the current preferred way for a majority of people to refer to other people whose skin looks different – was too controversial and inflammatory to permit. Apparently they had also neglected to apply this logic to their own game’s Black Temple.

It’s as if Blizzard and its employees understand the notion that they are supposed to be moral, but don’t really know how.

 

[Bad^Hat]

Ugh, I read that Joystiq article on the homo censors a little while back, really didn't sit right with me, even though I never actually noticed it when I was playing (swear filters are for ******s). Them censoring black is just... inscrutable. It's like they're solely focussed on trying to prevent conflict between their players without actually considering how their measures might make those same players feel.

Gonna have to read this one.

 

[Au-heppa]

That webzone doesn't seem to be working. I remember it having way too many words, though.

 

[Sulkdodds]

Another new Brindle joined us last week, both to be our house artist and to write about how Metal Gear Solid's strengths are those of Pac-Man, and why the former game became weaker when it moved too far away from the latter one. Bunbury Brindle (for it is he) is also formerly known on this site as Suicide42 or just Sui for short.

to veil the game-world in a realistic guise is inherently detrimental to the goal of communicating game mechanics, because entities with digital, limited functions (an enemy which can move in eight directions on flat ground, for example) are disguised as having analogue, potentially infinite functions (a human being who can traverse a wide range of terrain types), and our knowledge of the latter impedes our ability to learn about the former. Put simply, with realistic-looking games the player has to learn what entities CANNOT do, whereas with abstract games each entity is a blank canvas, and the player can learn a truer sense of such entities’ ludic abilities through trial and observation, unclouded by preconceptions based on a pseudo-realistic aesthetic.

(This is why, if one of your parents has ever walked in and watched you play a video game, they have probably asked some inane question along the lines of “why can he jump so high?” or “how can he survive being shot so much?”. A person with little inexperience of game rulesets will naturally apply real life rulesets to what they see on screen, and most gamers have (without realising) un-learned their real world expectations by immersing themselves in game worlds. My parents, of course, asked different questions: "why are you such a goddamned queer?" and "how in ****'s name haven't you beaten that boss yet?")

 

[ríomhaire]

Ah I was wondering who it was. I thought it might have been Glenn because he was promoting the blog a little bit at the start. Also, I still can't leave a comment. I don't seem to be able to work this Blogger thing at all. Oh. Perhaps it's because I have Ghostery on. I'll try temporarily disabling it.

Edit: It wasn't Ghostery. Strangely the button at the top right always says "Sign in" even though I've already signed in.

 

[Sulkdodds]

That's very confusing. You sure you can't leave an anonymous comment without signing in?

 

[kineaesth]

 

[ríomhaire]

Trying to comment on the penis article. No matter what I try (google account, anonymous, name/url) it just refreshes the page and nothing happens. Perhaps I'll try it from a different PC.

 

[ríomhaire]

I still can't seem to post. GORDDORMITFRONK.

 

[Sulkdodds]

I have no idea! D: I've set all the options to 'Let Irish People Post'???

For the benefit of others, today sees a return to normal service for the Brindle family, with a response from John Brindle to Bunbury's comparison of Metal Gear Solid and Pac Man. John launches with gusto into extolling the joys of eating in MGS3.

Because we depend for our sustenance on cramming other organic matter down our maw-tubes and swilling it about in our turbulent acid-bags, we cannot help but regard the activity as central to our emotional being; “you are what you eat.” When games tie that process to clear gains and losses in the player avatar’s size and capability, it acutely strengthens her identification with her player character.

Perhaps for that reason, eating in MGS3 feels personal, feels powerful. I cannot explain the libidinous pleasure I get from my gourmand escapades. My gustatory zeal is never exhausted: birds, fish, snakes, I consume; mangos, mushrooms, spiders and scorpions feed me; beeswax, goats and frogs are my fodder. For all my gluttony, I never fall to sloth (though I have eaten one). It’s aggressive self service, Bear Grylls’ 3-Michelin-starred bear grill.