Gamecast - 54 - "Improvised Discussion"

[Link Antilles]

In this show, we discuss bombs, media brawling, and moral choices.


You can download the show from here.

Question to Audience:

How should Fish end the life of his computer?

[Fish and Chips]

Download This Game is Wizard here.

[TheMelodyMaker]

Question to Audience:

How should Fish end the life of his computer?

Turn it off and remove the power button.

[uc pseudonym]

As per the discussion, I think there's one trick that might work: rearranging things. The same content reshuffled would go a long way to creating a different playing experience. At the most basic level, in some games you can choose the order of areas you travel. I think more complicated things could also be done without spending a lot of time/money to make new content.

For example, say two cities are being attacked and you choose which one you want to help. Whichever one you help gets saved, so it still has stores and some general NPCs. The other loses, so it has some generic enemy units wandering the streets and doesn't have those stores and NPCs (or perhaps very limited ones). If someone chose the other city, they'd get basically the same content, but the two areas would play differently.

Obviously, I don't know how feasible that is. But I think this model could potentially return a decent amount of variety for relatively little work on multiple paths (and with a little more work the paths could easily become more different).

How should Fish end the life of his computer?

Vlad Ţepeş.

[ich1990]

My own personal theory is that the real goal behind allowing free choices is to allow people's avatars to act in fashions similar to their human selves (or possibly in manners inappropriate for real life). In other words, they want to be able to craft a persona, rather than actually decide what to do on a case by case basis.

Personally, I like being an ultimate judge of good and evil, dispensing with punishments as I see fit. It gives me a power trip. I would argue that many people, however, don't care about the specifics of a situation, they just want to act it out in a way that their "type" of character would be most accustomed. I do not have any evidence for this, this is just the feeling I get from being around gamers.

Thus, in order to add depth to a game, instead of adding multiple paths or options, the game developers could focus on making the game plot line or dialog options specific to a certain class of character. This would be much the same way you could choose whether you wanted to be a Bourne, Bond, or Bauer. Recent games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age are taking this farther by allowing you to select origin stories (i.e. I grew up as a pig farmer in Idaho, I was a Welsh noble, etc.).

Perhaps, then, the ideal game is not a super open ended one like Fable, but one that has a very specific plot, yet lets you go about it differently depending upon a fixed class and origin story.

[quote="uc pseudonym"]Vlad Ţ]

Yes, and then mount your impaled laptop next to your front door to ward off salespeople.

[Raiden no Kishi]

Link, I think the super-hot stuff you're thinking of is either thermite or white phosphorous. For undying hatred of one's computer, I recommend the white phosphorous - it doesn't stop burning. Mind your exposed skin, though.

.rai//

[Link Antilles]

Link, I think the super-hot stuff you're thinking of is either thermite or white phosphorous. For undying hatred of one's computer, I recommend the white phosphorous - it doesn't stop burning. Mind your exposed skin, though.

.rai//

Yeah, I was thinking of thermite. Here's the video that inspired the idea:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOhPw_9MfU

[Shilohan ninja]

Question to Audience:

How should Fish end the life of his computer?

You could always move outta state, splurge for a keg or three of Mad Catz and light 'em around the computer on an isolated dock in the middle of a lake. I know friends up here in the rain state that do that kind of thing a lot around New Years and 4th of July, though not with the computer in the middle, of course. Just a thought. Or you could always hit me up and let me practice my epic ninja-smash skillz on it. It's been a while since I've had the chance to smash something with a good-sized sledge hammer or baseball bat.