Tiny Subversions

I've been down at my parents' house cleaning out my old room (they're selling the house in the not-too-distant future). I was reading an article in one of the local newspapers that profiled a gang member who had recently killed someone. The killer remarked that slitting the guy's throat "was just like deboning a chicken."

!!!

That's it. Let's get the meat industry to self-regulate with a ratings system labelling any raw meat with the bone inside as MA18+, raw boneless meat as T for teen, and precooked boneless meat as E for everyone. Furthermore, we should get congress to require that we check IDs at supermarkets for anyone who buys raw meat. I mean, experts (come on people, experts) know that deboning a chicken in meatspace has far more of an effect on a child's mind than simply deboning it in one of our popular first-person chicken deboners (FPCDs).

Sigh.

I'm actually for a lot of this video game regulation. I just find the philosophical backing of the rhetoric used in congress and talk shows to be completely missing the point. We have a classic case of people who don't know anything about psychology, ethics, or video games attempting to use psychology and ethics to regulate video games.

So now I present to you an idea that I had for a game in the vein of an Indie Game Jam 3 "people interacting" theme.

One bit of human behavior that always fascinates me is the unspoken set of rules that dictates where men will stand at a row of urinals--say at a rest stop on the highway. The basic goal is that if the urinals are to be used to their maximum potential, but without challenging the sexuality of any of the straight male participants, and without offending any of the males' rights to other men not seeing their willies, there must be one urinal empty between every urinal in use. We could program a nifty agent-based AI that meets this and a few other rules and unleash it upon interesting topologies of urinals (imagine an interstate rest stop designed by M.C. Escher or some such thing).

While that would be interesting in and of itself, we could add behavior like alpha males attempting to muscle out other males for urinal supremacy. We could arm everyone with weapons. Imagine seeing a giant war between males over the right to piss on one urinal or another: the camera pans back and you see utter chaos. It could be a pretty powerful satirical statement on war as a giant pissing contest.

Of course, I haven't yet described a game, but rather a screensaver. The game would be leading your squad of intrepid men in the fight for urinal supremacy.

That said, I shudder to think what kind of search engine results are going to point to my blog now.

So I bought Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas back when it was first released for the PS2. I really liked it. I think it's the best game in the series. I almost even finished it, which is amazing for a game that long. That is, I almost finished it until I got to the one mission where you have to fly a military jet. I tried 10 times to not crash the jet, but the damned thing flies completely differently than any other plane in the game. I quit in frustration, even though I was 95% of the way through the game at this point.

I hate it when games spend an awful lot of time teaching you a set of skills, and then in the interest of keeping things lively, throw challenges at you that have nothing to do with those skills. GTA is a recent example of this, but it's happened before. I love Sly Cooper, but I hated it when I needed to complete racing missions to move on to the next area. I didn't buy a racing game. I bought a platformer. Including an optional racing segment would be one thing--but while the platforming is brilliant, the racing is sub-par and furthermore is not the point of the game. As happened with GTA, I quit Sly in frustration.

Strangely, I came back to both Sly and GTA recently, and lo and behold, I finished both these frustrating levels without a hitch. It had been 4 months to a year since I had played either of these games, and all of a sudden I was doing well. Any theories on why this happens?

The Basketball Phenomenon is an article on game design written by Jamey Stevenson, who I just met last night at the Boston Postmortem. The article postulates that the more basketballs a video game has, the better it is. Read it and weep (with laughter).

Waaay back a few weeks ago, my friend Jo, who is a massive Sims addict, pointed me to a bunch of interesting posts on the official Sims message boards. I'm going to share some of the gems that I dug up.

The topic of the conversation on the board was that of cheating. In case you didn't know, cheating is a really complex topic in game studies, since everyone has their own conception of what cheating is. When it is and isn't okay to cheat is a different boundary for lots of people. Some folks think all cheating is wrong. Some people justify it in certain extenuating circumstances, and some folks argue, "It's just a game--I'll cheat all I want!" Is reading a FAQ cheating? Is quicksaving every three seconds cheating? And then there's the whole issue of preserving the sanctity of Huizinga's "magic circle", etc., etc.

Here's a few interesting posts and my take on them.

Whether I use the money cheat or not just depends upon the storyline I am creating. If I want to create a family on my wealthy side of town, then motherlode x2-20+ it is. I typically use kaching 1 or 2 times when creating any family that is larger than 2 members simply because 20,000 simoleons is really stretching a budget for 4+ sims.

There’s also a lot of good satisfaction from created a “self made man” type sim. My very first sim (who also has my real life name) started with no friends, a low paying job, and little beneficial items. Now he is the chief of staff, has a wife, and two children. [original post by Ermac1985]

Clarifying some terms: motherlode and kaching are both money cheats. I just thought this player's wish to create a "self made man" was sort of interesting--it appears that the player has a lot of different families that he uses cheats with and then one non-cheating family that retains the Horatio Alger aspect of the game.

I actually had to quit playing for a couple weeks because the money cheats made it so boring. Now that I’m getting back into it and not using money cheats, I’m really enjoying the game again. I still use boolProp to check gender preference, but that’s about it. And the only reason I do that is because once I learned you could check that I started feeling guilty getting my Sims into same sex relationships and finding out they aren’t in to that. Now I check first and shake my head every time at how much I’ve let the little people get to me! [original post by katonahtr2, emphasis mine]

Wow. So, boolProp is a cheat that lets you read the internal properties of elements in the Sims. While in normal gameplay terms, Sims don't really come with a preset gender preference, somebody actually used cheats to figure out that every Sim does in fact come with a preference. Then they used this illicitly mined data to infer more information about the game state, causing them to feel an emotion (guilt) that they would not have otherwise. This is cheating as a way to learn more about the gameworld--I remember doing the same with my Game Genie and Super Mario Brothers 3.

Brief tangent: in 1991, Nintendo actually believed that the Game Genie harmed their business by reducing the long-term value of its games. Meanwhile, I can't think of a single piece of technology that got me to spend more time playing games than my Game Genie. That thing was amazing--I'd spend hours and hours playing with different combinations of cheats, effectively becoming my own game designer, albeit with limited control over my design space.

I used to use money cheats too…but, once you get their creativity up to max, you don’t need to…you can sell paintings and novels for lots of simoleons…so much more fun…and yeah, I do use boolprop too much myself, cause you have to have full energy to do all those paintings and novels…lol [original post by pisceschick75]

I think it's fascinating how this player really wants to have a Sim who is an artist and lives that way. The game won’t let the player do that easily (believe me, I've tried!), so the player cheats. But cheating is okay, because it’s pretty much the game’s fault that a Sim can’t really be an artist. This is as opposed to my experience with the game. I have attempted to create a Sim who is an artist , failed, and I got really pissed off about it! If only I bothered to cheat, I could get around what this player perceives to be a design flaw.

I cheated all the time…boolprop, motherlode, kaching (before motherlode), moveobjects, you name it! Then I started the legacy challenge and it was so great! My sims had twins and I thought there was no way to make it w/out cheating, but I did, and the twins are now adults, so I guess it is possible. I love getting to redecorate or add on to the house when they get enough money. I jsut saved up and completely redid their house (it is a new generation, so a new house was in order). I agree that it is much more satisfying. Weird, huh? I do reserve the right to cheat with other families, still. Mostly for story purposes. [original post by castephens1006]

The Legacy Challenge was a contest proposed on the Sims 2 boards back in October 2004 (rules of the challenge here). This was an incredibly popular challenge that basically involved starting with one Sim and seeing how strong you can make a family from that Sim within 10 generations. Some folks even blogged their experience. Of course, there was no cheating allowed. Evidently the challenge showed this player that playing without cheats can be rewarding.

Also interesting is that this reformed cheater still cheats for story purposes--she/he wants to create stories to upload, presumably, and treats the cheats more as modding tools than anything else. This makes The Sims 2 seem almost like Garry's Mod for Half-Life 2.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on some interesting tidbits on cheating that I picked up from the Sims 2 message boards. Feel free to share your stories about cheating.