Exit 8 (2025)

Based on the game. Good pacing considering how little there was they could work with. Framing from different points of view worked well.

Silent Hill (2006)

Enjoyable. Not super scary, but OK enough. Nice to see some play logic being used.

Silent Hill ƒ

mixed at first.  Opening sequence, when the choir starts and the torii in the fog is shown... goose bumps.

But... then "just" more Japanese/Asian horror.

The bit in the fields, where at some point one of the crazy scarecrows follows you, and you notice by hearing it, but it doesn't move when you look at it... perfect.

 

Slowly Hanoki (you, main player) is called a traitor, and your "friends" share their ugly truths. More and more intense moments when you simply kill them - or let them be killed while you walk away - are adding.

The moment I had a "okay wait this is something different" was when your character saws off her own right arm.

There's not much - actually none - explanation (so far, still playing), but it suddenly got a step up. 

Silent Hill 2 (2024 remake)

Never played the original, but fantastic game.

Music, the David Lynch/Twin Peak feel, the music by Akira Yamaoka...     

Both the suspense/horror effects, as well as the story horror elements, were amazing.

 

Silent Hill 2

Didn't bother trying to geth the original working, as the stories are completely unrelated.

Pretty intense stuff. Good horror tropes, and they work really well. 

youtube - experiment "1000 Players Simulate Civilization: Rich & Poor"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef568d0CrRY 

 

Reminds me somehow a lot of the EVE Online massive heist stories. 

Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta- Snake Eater

Great stuff.  Not sure I can ever go back to the original.

Any Austin - "Do Grand Theft Auto V’s Power Lines Connect To Anything?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3iqVTDXK1Y

yet another amazing random video

like

* noah caldwell-gervais

* that carton box metal gear solid video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPmd9pZKTxE

Kirk Hamilton - "Spec Ops Writer on Violent Games: 'We're Better Than That'"

https://kotaku.com/spec-ops-writer-on-violent-games-were-better-than-th-460992384

Over the course of the talk, which Williams gave yesterday afternoon as a part of the GDC "Narrative Summit," his primary focus was the idea that any game is defined by action, and so the actions you undertake in the game will define the game's meaning. As an example, he said, if you're playing a platformer, the game will be defined by jumping. When you're playing a shooter like Spec Ops, the game will be defined by the act of killing a person with a gun. "When you're using an action as a tool, it's easy to disassociate from what that action is," Williams said. "When you play a shooter, that action is killing a person. When you sit down to play a shooter, you're essentially signing up to kill hundreds if not thousands of people over the course of the game."

Walker, the protagonist of Spec Ops, can't be all that righteous, Williams said, because he's got to kill enough people to fill many hours of gameplay. (Williams did jokingly point out that Nazis appear the only kinds of people who were excepted from this in video games. "Nazis are basically human demons," he said. Heh.) It's easy at the beginning of a game to have the killing make sense, but as the game goes forward, it becomes weirder and weirder that he's killing so many people. However, Williams pointed out, it's very easy to turn this weakness to a strength, at least for the story.

Key to that, Williams said, is having the characters themselves rationalize their actions, even the most extreme ones. They don't have to be successful at it, but they should at least try to explain themselves to themselves. In other words, the soldiers in Spec Ops should be killing people because they're soldiers, but as the game got more intense, they began to feel compelled to rationalize to themselves and one another why they were on such a violent, ultimately destructive quest. 

Brendan Keogh - "Talking is Harmful"

https://unwinnable.com/2013/04/09/talking-is-harmful/

Interesting enough essay on Spec-Ops

there was one thing that I saw and I thought, “He’s wrong on this. Do I tell him? I should tell him! No, I shouldn’t tell him! That sounds rude!” And that’s the thing. With the world being so much smaller these days, I don’t know how to interact with you in that regard.

The Cursed Judge

Found on Nebula, interesting-enough discussion of video games, like Jacob Geller, Errant Signal, Daryll Talks Videogames, ...

normative social influence, also, Losing

normative social influence - "follow the crowd", everyone stands in a line; you do so as well. Everyone drinking a beer. You're more likely to do so as well.

Also, too much exposure to things (ads) will start to have an adverse effect.

"Two Ways of Losing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5HQaVy85s0 

losing are emotional events that make us (more) impulsive

people who lose tend to gamble *more* / higher next round. Losers tend to lose more.

regulatory focus: when dealing with responsibilities, motivations, goals, 

- promotion focus: preoccuptation with growth, realising ones outcomes, realising ambitions
usually work faster
trying to make victory happen
tend to perform better when dealing with failure
more likely to quit temporarily (instead of forever)
more likely to switch tasks
outperform preventors when they are required to switch tasks
switching is another chance to perform something new
studies suggest more likely to report higher well-being

- prevention focus: safety, securyt, avoiding undesirable outcomes, fulfilling one's responsibilities
likely to focus on tasks needed
trying to avoid failure/loss
more likely to quit (for good) when dealing with failure
often unable to move on from undertaking, as they are focused on preventing loss
perform better on tasks involving perseveration, less susceptible to distracted
less likely to swap
winning becomes more relief than a prize

1000xResist

This is straight into Kentucky Route Zero and Firewatcher territory.

Great story, about sisters, about Iris, surviving this plague, the Occupants (??), the Chinese immigrating into America backstory...

The visual story telling, the moment you think you have agency where you're going, and the game hijacks you naturally.

Sometimes the dialogues do *not* allow you to try all options, which is great.

The theme of a single place but shown in different ways, the whole "home base", first just normal, then celebratory, then at night...

The visuals become more and more amazing

How it makes you "discover" dialogue to "answer the riddle". In essense, it's learning the right responses. In reality, it's learning about loss and grief and emotions.

pixel art - the greatest game

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0 

https://octavinavarro.com/scene-51-bubbles

8bit - "it's small enough that you can think about controlling the environment"

All found via the Greatest Game podcast

Lewis Gordon - "The Glitch Art of ‘Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’"

https://artreview.com/the-glitch-art-of-zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom/

 

In this context of speed and avatar movement, it's fitting that the word glitch should derive from German or Yiddish words meaning 'to slide' or 'to slip'. It was subsequently popularised in the 1950s and 60s by employees at NASA, coming to mean 'a spike or change in voltage in  an electrical circuit'. And now in video games and other digital media, glitches tend to to produce moments of horror, disruption and incongruence, by virtue of interrupting whatever reality principle has been established. This is partly why the similarly hyped but bugridden Cyberpunk 2077 was panned by some critics and players at the time of its 2020 release. Nathan Wainstein, writing in the LA Review of Books, described Cyberpunk's glitches as "bald" in two distinct ways: "in their transparently unintended nature" and also their "surreal puncturing of reality itself". They broke immersion in a game that was intended to represent the apex of modern graphical prowess. By leaning into stylised, decidedly cartoonish graphics and animations, Nintendo's game operates according to a different reality principle, one that is ultimately more forgiving.

Lewis Gordon - "The Glitch Art of ‘Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’"

https://artreview.com/the-glitch-art-of-zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom/

In this context of speed and avatar movement, it’s fitting that the word glitch should derive from German or Yiddish words meaning ‘to slide’ or ‘to slip’. It was subsequently popularised in the 1950s and 60s by employees at NASA, coming to mean ‘a spike or change in voltage in an electrical circuit’. And now in video games and other digital media, glitches tend to produce moments of horror, disruption and incongruence, by virtue of interrupting whatever reality principle has been established. This is partly why the similarly hyped but bug-ridden Cyberpunk 2077 was panned by some critics and players at the time of its 2020 release. Nathan Wainstein, writing in the LA Review of Books, described Cyberpunk’s glitches as ‘bald’ in two distinct ways: ‘in their transparently unintended nature’ and also their ‘surreal puncturing of reality itself’. They broke immersion in a game that was intended to represent the apex of modern graphical prowess. By leaning into stylised, decidedly cartoonish graphics and animations, Nintendo’s game operates according to a different reality principle, one that is ultimately more forgiving.

Where Breath of the Wild was rooted in the pastoral, Romantic tradition of a lone warrior wandering a mythic landscape, Tears of the Kingdom asks you to mine its natural resources in order to construct machines. The game is partly about mastering such a place, of bringing it under your dominion, thus pulling Zelda into the age of reason.

Fallout (series)

real solid. 

hope s2 will be just as good

great how they show separate POVs and it all coming together; solid writing

Christian Donlan - "The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds"

https://www.eurogamer.net/the-beauty-and-drama-of-video-games-and-their-clouds

Secret Knowledge, a book about looking twice and noticing what nobody else has spotted,

VaatiVidya - "The Entire Story of Armored Core 6"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n9eakXNsIQ&pp=ygUMYXJtb3JlZCBsb3Jl

Reid McCaster, Edward Smith - "Bullet Points" podcast

listened to only one full episode (Spec Ops:The Line) so far, but enjoyable.