Real Life vs Video Game Life

I'm often struck in the vast difference between video game life and real life, especially when it comes to war.  I just finished reading "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge.  As a real to life account of war, it it vastly different than what is experienced in the average video game.  The average video game throws amazing circumstances at you and you end up fighting constantly, effectively dying and retrying.  Video games are full of banzai charges and insane attacks.  It's the kind of stuff that makes for great movie scenes.  It's also things that were learned and quit.

By the time of the battles at Pellilou and Okinawa, the Japanese banzai charge had gone the way of the dinosaur.  It was an ineffective action when faced down by a bunch of entrenched Marines.  It was replaced with deep emplacements and disciplined fire.   That led to slow slogging battles battles where every inch of ground was a difficult struggle. 

You don't see much of that in video games.  It's all blind charges and insane maneuvers as your bullet sponge avatar heroically destroys an obviously inferior enemy.  It's a sad blight on humanity.

I once thought of a movie to describe real war.  It would have been called Guard, and it would be four hours long in real time.  No quick cuts, no exciting scenes.  You have three people standing in a guard tower watching a mobile populace move through their day to day lives. 

It would have been the most boring movie known to man.  But then it would have been the most accurate war movie ever.  Just by observing you would learn the wonders of high intensity anxiety and tension.  It would have been beautiful. 

But then, I've never been a screen writer.  Or much less a story board person.  It would have been interesting. 

The general answer is that real life is not video games.  And that's about all there is to it. 

Chemical Bombs / Games Theory / Candy Crush

Last night before bed I was contemplating Candy Crush.  I’ve played the game a lot before, and yet I can’t ever seem to say anything nice about it.  And yet, I continue playing over and over and over again until my lives run out and I’m told I have to go sit in a corner and wait.  And at some point, I come back and do the same thing over again. 

Why do I do it?  What makes me continue to play a pointless game?  Why do I continue playing when I can’t think of a nice thing to say about it? 

Better yet, how can I replicate that to create something that teaches?  I’ve messed with quite a few learning games before, but most of them are pretty much the same thing.  All of them allow you to participate as much as you want.  I think the scarcity mentality of the game is really what makes the game. 

I grew up on Super Mario Brothers.  We’re talking back in the in olden days when Nintendo and Sega were fighting like cat and dogs.  I had a Nintendo in those days, and my brother and I would play Super Mario brothers for hours.  And hours.  And hours.  At points, the game grew excruciatingly painful to play.  Certain sequences were just nightmares.  But eventually, through a combination of luck and skill the level could be defeated. 

The biggest thing about the game was its scarcity mentality.  There was a point in the game where it didn’t matter how good you had done the previous times, it was over.  When your lives ran out, it didn’t matter that you played for 30 straight hours.  It was over. 

And I think that scarcity mentality is part of what makes Candy Crush enjoyable.  If Candy Crush could be played for hours on end, it probably wouldn’t be played as much as it is.  But the scarcity mentality of only having a few lives makes the game slightly more interesting. 

Maybe I’ll turn it into a chemistry game called Chemical Bombs (a slight joke on Bonds) where you use a limited set of the periodic table to create balanced chemical equations.  The tiles would be the periodic table times, and the goal would be to create chemical bonds and create…  something.  Maybe several neutral equations, and seveal that were negative and some that were positive.  I think that depends on the level. 

Seems like a good idea to me…   

Game worlds

I talked at one point about Fallout 3 a few times.  I can’t find the other one, otherwise I’d link it here. 

I ended up buying The Elder Scrolls IV Skyrim, and I’ve been spending some time with that here and there.  Though it is hard for me to accept, I occasionally need a break from work.  So I generally play video games.  And I only use timed increments.  Unless it’s the weekend. 

Anyways, going back to an article I think I wrote but I can’t find.  The article was about how Fallout 3 lacked a sense of desperation and misery that one would expect from a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Sure, it looks great.  But the horror of the world, even though it is discussed, is fairly blah.  Its violence for violence’s sake and it doesn't have the impact it should.  The world should feel terrible most of the time, and yet it doesn't.  Society is making a comeback, and the horror just isn't there like it should be. 

Skyrim portrays the horror different, though.  I think it does a better job than Fallout 3 of portraying human depravity and human suffering.  Fallout 3 uses every in your face technique it can.  Skyrim uses subtlety, and it works much better.  A necromancer den in Skyrim seems to speak more to horror than a Fiend camp in Fallout 3.  Yay, the Fiends are drug addicted bad guys who are horrible people.  Where are the after effects?  Where is the trail of dead bodies or piles of skulls?  It just isn’t there.

A necromancer den has a distinct degree of horror because it is separated from the rest of the humanity in the game.  The rest of the characters in the game are hearty, peace loving folk.  So when you see depravity, it is a shock.  In Fallout 3, you see depravity and it’s the nature of the beast.  And the depravity isn’t very depraved.  You don’t see burned corpses over open fires.  You don’t see dead bodies piled in cages, or hung from ceilings. 

I’d throw in pictures, but you can see how well those turn out.  They look just like my Fallout 3 pictures.  This one was of the Shrine of Azura in snowfall.  Five minutes later, I got wasted by a daedra in the Azura’s Star quest.  Anyways. 

I think there are good and bad parts to both games, but both are worth playing.  

Living in Tahiti

Another on call weekend, so any attempts I make to do anything get interrupted.  Despite all that, I keep trying.  I’ve made it this far, so that is progress.  I may get this finished before morning. 

The only problem is I have no idea what to say.  None what so ever.  Work is work and it’s a holiday weekend that I will be working.  I don’t know what to say about any of it.  I know I’ve been playing more Fallout: New Vegas than I’d like to admit recently.  I finished Dead Money and I’m moving into Honest Hearts.  I’m far enough in (level 38) where money isn’t an issue, and neither is quality weapons of mass destruction.  The Barret, er Anti-Material Rifle, even does wonders against deathclaws, that problem is solved.  Really, it’s just a matter of finding and examining decent terrain.  I haven’t been killed by encounters in a while, so the game doesn’t frustrate me as much as you’d think by now.  I spent a lot of time dying in Dead Money because it’s got a bunch of sections where you have to find random hiding spots to prevent a collar from blowing up.  Yeah, it’s annoying.

That being finished, you end up back in the Mojave wasteland with more money than you need in the guise of 37 gold bars, snail walked out of the Sierra Madre Casino.  Sure, it took forever to get all that junk back to my hideout ,but with that kind of money…  Well, the game gets kind of easy when you don’t have to worry about money.  It’s about 8,000 caps per gold bar, which equates to an in game amount of about 296,000 caps.  So you’ve got all the money in the world to do whatever you want.

On the fun side, I got bored and wiped out Vault 3.  The Fiends inside made easy prey, but it did get me thinking about the kind of life they are described as having.  Though the backstory is interesting, it makes me wonder how such a society could survive.  That’s generally the description as provided by most dystopian futures, but the Fiends are an extreme example.  They are portrayed as drug users, murders, and rapists who have no clue what is going on due to their constant drug use. 

As with most video games, there is lots of talk, but not much action.  I think it’s the mental picture that fails to capture the true horror of this dystopian future.  The talk makes it sound bad, but the actions are generally the same as the friendlies of the Mojave Waste.  There is somewhat of a desire to wipe them out.  Only the back stories and discussions presented by several non-player characters make them seem despicable. 

The true horror of the situation is far beyond what could accurately be described in video games, or at least by people in civilized worlds.  The Art of Manliness describes such a situation as a trip from Siberia to Tahiti.  In Tahiti, there were no major differences between the sexes because resources were plentiful and there was no need to protect or fight for resources.  As such, the men and women end up in roughly the same roles.  In comparison to other areas, this was an aberration.  In the rest of the developing world, men held the role of protector and provider.  This resulted in a very low survival rate.  The average death age was late thirties to early forties.  So seeing people in Fallout New Vegas who have survived to old age seems weird. 

Back to the Fiends, though.  The Fiends show a sanitized, homogenized version of what happens in the world.  It shows a great disparity between the life in Tahiti and the life in Siberia.  Those living in Tahiti have little realization of what life was like in Siberia.  The Fiends are a good example of what a person living in Tahiti would think of a person living in Siberia.  In reality, the video game description of hell on earth just doesn’t match reality.  It’s much too easy. 

Fallout 3

So I bought Fallout New Vegas when it went on sale on Steam.  So $12 got me all the add-ons they currently sell, and countless hours of death and destruction.  I’ve been a fan of Fallout since Fallout 1.  I even liked Fallout Tactics.  Fallout 3 was really good, but I couldn’t get it to install on Windows 7.  So here I am with New Vegas. 

Really, I’m enjoying this game quite a bit.  There is a lot of world to explore, and small little secrets to experience everywhere you roam.  There’s just something about wandering a well conceived world and experiencing everything it has to offer. 

I have to admit, the game doesn’t start really taking off until your character reaches level 9 or 10.  Before that point, you die too easily and have too little access to decent weapons.  Running into random groups of enemies is always a question as to whether you will live or die, and that removes much of the fun of the game.

But around level 9 or 10, you get to the point where you think you’ve got a decent chance.  You still think twice about taking out large groups of enemies, but a small group seems doable and your firepower seems to be hitting at the right level to make short work of your victims.  It’s at this point that you finally feel you can explore without getting wiped off the map like some weak pathetic creature.  Rather than being the constant victim, it’s almost as if you are reaching the point of equals with your enemies.

I would love to take lots of pictures of some of the weirder stuff you run into, but any picture I take ends up looking messed up.  So I guess I won’t.   Maybe I should try out of full screen mode.  But that’s more work than I currently want to put into this thing. 

More Direct X (or direct failure)

And the install of the Direct X SDK didn’t work.  Great.  Just great.  Or at least it didn’t work for C#.  Maybe I should wade back into C++.  Let’s see what happens when I install one of those suckers.

First, the typical “project out of date with your compiler” problem.  Let’s wait for that to finish…

Ok, so wow… it actually compiled and ran.  There’s some stinking progress. 

Now I just have to figure out what in the world happened to the C++ I used to know… 

Ok, it still makes a relative degree of sense, so I’m not completely lost…  Flabbergasted and behind the times by many, many years.  But I think I can read up on this and make it work.  At the very least, the sample compiles, and that’s more than I could say for the C# stuff. 

Honestly, this is why I gave up C++ in the first place.  Building frameworks gets old after a while.  Especially if you just want to test something fairly basic before spinning it into something larger.  Is that so much to ask?  Really, I don’t think it should be. 

And for me, that’s the appeal of C# and VB.  You spend a lot more time programming and a lot less time reading documentation, figuring out what variable you need to get a text box to appear.  That streamlining of certain parts makes the entire thing much more palatable.  So I guess those days are over for the most part.  Partly because Microsoft writes cruddy documentation and partly because I’d rather spend time doing want to do as opposed to hunting down every single esoteric little variable that may or may not be used and is probably not documented very well.

Final Fantasy 7

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 7 during my vacation.  It’s not the original Playstation version, as I don’t have a TV or a Playstation.  I picked up the Steam version when it was half price.  So $7 for the game isn’t half bad.

For a while, I was playing with my laptop keyboard, and that didn’t work all that well.  It was sufficient, but it didn’t feel very good or work well.  In cleaning out the hall closet, I found an old computer controller.  It’s a LogitechDual Action.  One of those.  Makes the game run a whole lot better and the controls actually work like they are supposed to. 

Windows 7 support is better than Windows XP support, as well.  I used to use this thing for some PC games (GTA San Andres, and a couple of others), but XP didn’t seem to support using every single button.  DirectX limitations I’m guessing that have since been fixed.  So you can use all the keys in the same game.  Yay!

Back to Final Fantasy 7.  So far, I’ve made it to the Junon area and picked up Yuffie.  Yuffie was an absolute pain to get to show up, and without a cheat guide, I think that would be one of the most overbearing question chains in the world.  But, I’m not proud or some sort of ridiculous completest.   So I just cheat when I need.

I think I’m growing to hate the quick time/button sequence events.  I hate them with a passion in a regular game, and they are even worse in an RPG.   I guess I see them as copouts for regular action and controls for the most part.  Indigo Prophecy was horrendous with them.  That game was basically walking and quick time events.  But quick time events in RPG?  Why?  I just don’t understand it.

21st Century Virtual Boy

During my vacation, I stopped by my parents’ house and dug through the attic.  I found a lot of things from my youth.  One of those was a Nintendo Virtual Boy.  It’s mostly complete, but the eye guard was missing.  Once I finally made it back home, I bought some batteries and fired the sucker up.  Sure enough, it still worked.  Kind of.  The left lens is a bit flaky and there are some serious problems when trying to play the thing.  I bought a toaster on the same trip that got me the batteries, and I improvised a head cover to block out outside light with cardboard and electrical tape.  It’s ugly as sin, but functional.  I still think the thing is pretty cool after all these years.  Though flipping through eBay, I don’t think it’s worth trying to sell.  Sure, I could recover what I spent years ago for it, but that’s not the point.

The other thing I found was my old manga collection.  During one phase in my life, I collected lots and lots of Viz manga.  It’s been a while since I looked at what equates to a large size box of comic books.  Everything from Berserk to Rurouni Kenishin is represented, though nothing is anywhere near complete.  I even had a lot of Dragon Ball manga.   What impresses me more is Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Domu.  Akira is one of the best written comics I’ve ever read.  Still.   Very interesting.   There are probably more thoughts to go through, but I’ll deal with those later. 

Also interesting to note that after putting down my manga/anime phase, I’ve never picked it back up.  Such a distinct line in the sand, if I don’t say so myself. 

Edit:  Noticed I left the title still on the blog, and took it out.  No content adjusted.