måndag 18 februari 2013

Make Extreme Edition Home Over!

You know what's really bleedin' stupid?

Extreme Makeover Home Edition.

You know the show perfectly well; a guy who is more enthusiastic than fucking Steve Irwin remakes people's homes because they suck, and everyone starts crying all the time because it's such a Cinderella story!

It's shit.

Come on, you know it's shit.

No, I'm not talking about how disgustingly cheerful and emotional the whole thing is. I mean, that's sickening in itself, but the really terrible part is that those damn houses aren't actually fucking livable!

Take one family, for instance, where the youngest daughter was quite fond of pastries and sweets, as if there exists a form of child that isn't exactly that. So, what did they do? They decorated the whole thing so that abso-fucking-lutely every single detail in the whole room was pastry-themed. The cushions were doughnuts, the walls were covered in pastry images, everything revolved around that theme.

What kind of a fucking bedroom is that supposed to be? Yeah, so the kid has a sweet tooth, can you imagine what'll happen when that kid is a 15 year old emo trying to bring her friends home to listen to The Cure in a room dressed up like a baker's shop? Ever considered that maybe, just maybe, kids change what they like? Heck, I played fucking hockey when I was a kid, a fact that anyone who knows me now will realize illustrates my point to a terrifying degree.

However, the worst example is one family where the mother had passed away. That's sad for any family, but in this case they had Extremely Creepy Makeover Building a Fucking Mausoleum Edition to help them out. See, the people doing the show thought it'd be a nice touch to have poetry written by the mother covering the walls.

What...the...fuck?

So, how do you expect the kids will get over their mother when their whole house is a monument to her? It's a mausoleum, a graveyard, the walls of which contain her epitaph.

Oh, and while you're at it, how do you think the first visit of the father's new girlfriend, because he will definitely fucking get one sooner or later (Pro tip: people fucking move on!), to the house that's covered in the writing of the dead mother?

That's creepy as shit!

söndag 17 februari 2013

Addictiveness!

What makes a game, a drink, or a particular brand of gym shoe addictive?

Surely, that is something which has been contemplated by Electronic Arts, Systembolaget, and Adidas for many years already, and the only ones able to pin it down so far are Systembolaget. Come to think of it, that's quite ironic considering the role that the government takes in minimizing damage from alcohol to society.

No, wait, ironic isn't what it is...it's some other word...oh, yes; huge fucking hypocrisy!

Anyway, onward to dick jo...games!

I think it's time for me to finally give my views on what makes games addictive, because I know you have been waiting for a very very long long time for that very thing. Okay, so maybe I don't really know what the word 'addictive' means, so I'll just line up and shoot down things that make you want to play a game over and over.

Of course, it's not just one single thing, so I'll try to take us through a few of them. Let's get this show on the road!

First, on our list, is the concept of 'Shit to do'. After all, you want to have stuff to do in a game, and this can be accomplished in different ways. The easiest, but by far the least entertaining, is repetition. You just make the player do one or two things over and over again, IE your good old Diablo or Borderlands. One kill is pretty much the same as the other.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean the game sucks, but it's not a particularly inventive way of getting you hooked.

Another way of doing it is to simply go the Bethesda way and make a billion different things to do and pack the game with it until it bursts out of its pores. You add easter eggs, sidequests, different kinds of crafting, furnishing and the kitchen sink. This one is more difficult and costly because you actually need to design all of the different things separately rather than copy-pasting the lot of it. Rockstar also like to do this. By doing it this way, you're unlikely to be able to experience everything in a single playthrough, so I'll have to have another go at it. And another.

The third way is giving you a million things to do, each and every one of them mutually exclusive, IE you give the player lots of choices along the way but they can only take one of two and a half quadrillion paths, so they need to play it again and again just to see how it would pan out. This includes the powers that be giving you the option to make either an evil, goody-two-shoes or flamboyantly homosexual character. See also: Bio-fucking-ware. Fuck this option, because I only ever either do goody-two-shoes or Hitler anyway.

The last way I'll bring up is the option of simply giving you such a bloody rewarding storytelling experience that you'll come crawling back in spite of everything else to go through that marvelous adventure one more time. In other words, what Dragon Age Origins did to make me want to play through it more than once, or even once, seeing as how the game mechanics themselves sucked big black...truffles!

So, let me just mail this to EA and maybe they'll make another game that doesn't suck. FUCK YOU Command & Conquer 4!

onsdag 6 februari 2013

The Brain!

Isn't the human brain just a magnificently stupid thing? After all, we tend to imagine that the brain somehow perceives the world at it is, but it really doesn't in any way.

We see, but that's just light bouncing off shit.

We hear, but that's just airwaves bouncing off shit.

We feel, but that's just reports from little nerve endings when WE bounce off shit.

We perceive the world vicariously, quite like how a game world is viewed through a computer screen. The really amazing part is how immersed we can get into a world that we're just looking at through a window and aren't really part of.

When you play a game like Skyrim, you're swallowed up by the experience, and you imagine that you're in the game, but when you look outside of the screen you can clearly see that you're looking at a brightly lit rectangle. But the great magic trick is that we don't realize that ALL life is like that.

In fact, I'd like to propose rather a different metaphor for the brain than one of an incredibly advanced computer; namely one of a rather mediocre daily newspaper.

"Hey, that sounds insane, just like everything else you write! And also, you're ugly!", you might say.

Shut up! I don't care about your opinions on my opinions or my appearance, I may respond.

So, anyway, the newspaper office, or brain, gets information from reporters, IE nerves, about what the hell is going on. Just like a newspaper, your brain is pretty half-arsed when it comes to fact checking. It basically has a look at the information and decides if it's plausible or not. Apart from that, it sorta just assumes that the reporter isn't just making shit up.

And just like a newspaper, it gets facts mixed up, it gets hung up on its own prejudices and the stuff that it prints on the front pages is stuff you don't really have any reason to give a shit about. And just like any disreputable rag, it panders to the reader's, in this case your, prejudices, so it only provides information twisted to fit in with your own view of the world.

Rather stupid, the whole thing, really.