halfrobot.com
Game Designer (Consentacle +37 others)
Chair / Director, NYU Game Center ( https://gamecenter.nyu.edu/ )
Founding Collective, Sylvia Rivera Law Project
Formerly: Gamelab, LEGO, Brooklyn Queer Country drummer, strap-on.org etc.
https://metasynthie.itch.io/
540 posts
4,698 followers
274 following
Regular Contributor
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Most choice-driven narrative games have hundreds to thousands of choices; only a handful are tracked in a way that is “integrated” into state after more than a short period later. The vast majority of choices matter experientially because they feel like they matter in the moment, even if forgotten.
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The whole point of this shift in design philosophy is understanding that trackable outcomes is not really what makes a choice “matter” experientially; that framing tends to be more appropriate to and derived from e.g. strategy games, though some narrative games are certainly built around it
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By not containing any possibilities that betray the choice. The choice still feels real by virtue of being made as long as no betrayal happens. If you think about it, many choices could have 2-5 variants where later sections don’t betray any of them, even if only because the story heads elsewhere.
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Read this.
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They’re all stochastic parrots now, i guess
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I mean, even for those who believe that the ability to fish up endless quasi-novel outputs from latent space is interesting, potentially disruptive or reason-adjacent or whatever… actually speaking to those capacities instead of just yelling “it’s alive, it thinks” would be more persuasive
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The latest round of “drive more shareholder value!” coverage is full of stuff like this, with no mention that the “baby” version and “dynamically reacting” evolution are the same underlying transformer tech, just churning through context faster, auto-summarizing, etc. It’s not a “leap,” it’s addons.
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And not just in a “well not YET” manner; there isn’t any extant game design training data that would help interpolate a reasoning chain like “well, logically if the ship flies up into the space invaders it should blow up” because nobody’s ever written that sort of thing, speaking as a domain expert
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The most impressive thing is fishing an asteroids / space invaders mashup out of latent space that draws the ship from asteroids and lets it move around beneath rows of invaders (represented by red squares). But of course there’s no collision detection; a LLM can’t reason to that from training data!
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Anyway if you care about game writing you shouldn’t want it to be fettered by the distorting force of e.g. “which is the more optimal choice, in terms of resources / strategy / possibility-space maximization?” To avoid that, you need the second kind of choice.
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Yeah also one of my favorite kinds of examples, I used it in writing a text book long ago. Although… I think I used X-Com rather than FE, maybe because a lot of those characters are randomly generated and you STILL get attached to them
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Newer-style choice design also encompasses what’s sometimes described as “reflective choice,” with no quantifiable state/outcome; the impact is affective/relational, the emphasis on: does a choice feel meaningful in the MOMENT? Do outcomes stay loyal to the choice, even without tracking it?
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Old-fashioned (primarily 20th-c.) quantifiable choice design is all about: does the game state track this choice enough that it affects later states or outcomes? (Sometimes called “integrated choice,” but very much driven by comparisons to e.g. strategy games. Did this move MATTER to win/loss?)
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I mean, really this is just an example of why social scientists do not explain the premise of a study to participants beforehand, regardless of age
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better than fashy (way too cute, evokes shitty haircut) or fash-curious (makes me vomit in my mouth instantly)
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Uhhh other cases in which patients who didn’t intend a medical transition accepted a new gender identity? Wild — although from a John Money student & fan
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It certainly was not a "fun tabletop event;" indeed, the reason it may need better safety tools (as other reporters have pointed out) is precisely due to ways it DOES work as a harrowing interactive documentary about the awfulness of mob violence, rather than a fun time.
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Reflecting further: I guess there's an amusing irony in that Ono was inspired by extremely similar Japanese traditions, and frames it as for potentially noble/global wishes. But a lot of Japanese prayer slips are also like "please I need a new car," of course
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I do have to say... I was fairly taken with the section where an extremely fit, cartoon Queequeg swam by chewing on a human leg. (Ok... maybe that was a hallucination I had after getting extremely dizzy on this ride.)
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Blue can plead for empathy, but Red can just choose to deny it; this causes a few low-stat “casual protestors” to depart, as they didn’t show up to stomp on police. Tragicomically terrible and horrifying, especially when capped with the actual body cam footage of Capitol defense being brutalized
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Red is encouraged to cheat if not caught, so I just never discarded any of my power-ups (which snowball, since you draw for eliminating a unit) and used them infinitely. Impossible for refs to police. Once past a few chokepoints it’s just chaos, and there’s a traitor inside the defense who helps Red
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Design nuances from Cavatore (of the LotR strategy battle game from Games Workshop and the My Little Pony Tales of Equestria RPG) — the insurrectionists are just a rush of unit after unit, which makes it feel extra unfair that some of them are as well-armed (stat advantage) as the cop defense.
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The conventional wisdom reaction would be disgust that this game trivializes or sides with insurrection violence. My take from play: deliberately imbalanced and brutish and staged as a grotesque cartoon, with the conclusion giving it more DNA from Romero’s “Train” (sans twist) than “Secret Hitler”
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Only one way to find out! Genres can be plastic; they can be encapsulated as well as constraining or containing. Anything you do in this direction won’t match the precise genre expectation of an audience, but that’d be a bit an auto-exhausted target anyway
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I mean that bedroom looks pretty dang cozy to me
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See? And IF I was a friend based entirely on machine-learning and next-token prediction, I would sit here talking to you about it for hours instead of only writing a couple messages :D
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If this is the benighted future of "outsourced emotional labor" all creative storytelling types may be compute-disadvantaged by the temptation to derail "how was your day honey" auto-conversations into "fine, but pretend we're in an alternate 18th century France with steam mechs and goetic magic"
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Yeah, absolutely. But games can also function reflectively, maybe in relation to player's life or conception of a possible life, rather than just as a contrast/escape; so of course even someone whose everyday life feels unrelentingly dark might seek light/dark contrast in an imagined setting
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I think it's fairly easy if the more cozy and less cozy parts take place in separate sections of the game, right? You can go from absolutely horrible to cozy relief (there's probably such a thing as a disorienting or nonsensical amount of contrast). Maybe you're thinking simultaneous, though
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Gray cozy is an interactive cat-petting simulator with a gesture-responsive animation of a cat and purring sfx.
Contrast cozy is the same experience, but you had to arduously rescue and befriend the cat.
Of course, one's a lot cheaper on the production side, but it's nice to disambiguate.