GameIntrospection

Gaming on Data: Gaming Scripts – Aggression over time. A long time.

Gaming Scripts series:

Touching back on what we found out in the previous post was that games, in general, use aggressive language considerably. Granted this is from a small sample size of AAA titles, but are titles that permeate through the gaming community. Required reiterating in-case there are new readers to this post who hasn’t read the last one, yet. (Cough, cough.)

But the last post looked at a game as the sum of its parts and not the parts that made up that sum.

And there’s a reason for that. The parts of a game’s script are a bit messy, jumbly and noisy. The above is the running average of the sentiment, the polarity of aggression where negative (red) denotes more aggressive language and positive (green) denotes more friendly language. But these graphs for the most part are bit too noisy to make sense of them aside from the general feeling that a game is. Comparing say the Call of Duty games, where there’s very little green up top but a whole lot of red underneath, makes it easy to assume that its language is more aggressive in nature than say Portal 2 where the opposite is true with its green hair and ginger public area.

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August 5, 2015 2

Gaming on Data: Gaming Scripts – Language and Harsh Undertones

We play a game and absorb a lot of created by the developers. Gorgeous tropic landscapes; the honks, footsteps and clatter of an urban environment; the dialectic change for stepping into 1950s New York in the Bronx. The developers and artists and writers put a lot of time sculpting and crafting their environment and it leaves an impression on you. When you put down Assassin’s Creed 2, aside from the killing, freerunning, building scaling that you do, you also absorb a bit of 15^th century Italy. The architecture becomes recognizable, the attire becomes familiar and you learn many of the ins and outs of getting around the city. This very much thanks to the developing teams request to keeping the game period perfect and because of that, a part of the game seeps into us and we learn from it and grow from it.

For this short iteration of Gaming on Data, I got a bit curious about the scripts behind the game, the writing for the game because gaming is just as much a visual distraction as it is a conceptual one. Much of the writing that a player comes out of the characters that interact within it, so that’s what I focused on.

For this, I scraped the internet for a few scripts for somewhat current AAA titles are prolific in that they cause a large impression on the gaming community. But finding these scripts is not easy, so I managed to only get the following:

Scripts Scraped:

Bioshock
Bioshock 2
Bioshock Infinite
Call of Duty – Black Ops
Call of Duty – Black Ops 2
Call of Duty – Ghosts
Call of Duty – Modern Warfare
Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2
Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 3
Curse of Monkey Island
Grand Theft Auto 4
Half Life
Half Life 2
Mass Effect
Mass Effect 2 (Incomplete)
Mass Effect 3
Portal
Portal 2
Red Dead Redemption
Secret of Monkey Island
Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
Uncharted
Uncharted 2
Uncharted 3

The above is a graph showing the number of unique words within each game and something obvious jumps out: RPGs and Open World games have a lot of text. Not even by a small margin, like a significant margin.

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August 4, 2015 3

Thoughts on: Rockman 3 Burst Chasers (The opposite of speed is frustration)

Watching SGDQ 2015 over the past week helped to prove two things to me. The first is that regardless of the game, watching someone who has devoted their time into mastering anything is mesmerizing regardless if the game was Tetris: Grandmaster, Mario: Lost Levels, or Super Noah’s Ark 3D. The second that should be apparent is that playing a game quickly is hard. To have small (1/60 – 5/60 per second) frame windows to inputs, mastering complex rhythm sensitive button combinations, and knowing how to react to during long sessions of concentration is something to admire. But some games can be made to be played faster, like the video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ietmEOgkbHg&t=655

Rockman 4: Burst Chasers is a rom hack of Rockman 3 played at a high gameloop and that speed makes all the difference in terms of difficulty with the game. Think of strapping a blaster to Sonic and throwing him into the Megaman world.

The game was intended to be played at the pace and speed of Megaman, fast enough to get and understanding of the world and decent enough time to react to it. Throw Sonic into this world and it becomes a chaotic mess. The only thing that a player can do is to try and take it slow, like Megaman would, until you develop the reaction enough and are comfortable enough with RockSonic to run through the world at the speed that RockSonic was intended to run at, or memorize the game world to know when to do what action.

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August 3, 2015 0

SGDQ 2015 Highlights

Summer Games Done Quick 2015 has wrapped up this morning. The event raised around 1.25 million during the week long charity stream where around 125 games and 140 players donated their time and expertise to give the gaming community an entertaining 24/7 display of gripping moments, glitched games and great commentary.

Background

For the uninitiated, the point of the Games Done Quick community is to beat a game as quickly as possible. For any given game, there is a pocketed community that devotes hours in finding the fastest path, developing the best execution and discovers the newest time savers. Completing a game can mean many things to many people. The categories are typically:

Any % (Complete the game with any percent of the game completed)
100% (Complete the game with everything collected)
Glitchless (Complete the game without unintended exploits)
Race (Compete against other players to beat the game as quickly as possible) – used more for games with heavy randomness throughout the game.

To view the official world records for many games, you can check them out at http://speeddemosarchive.com/

This is probably enough background to understand the majority of speedrun videos and enough to understand the highlights for SGDQ2015.

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August 2, 2015 3

Let’s Talk About: Her Story

A dim lit room. A lone computer screen in the middle of that room radiating all of the noticeable light around you. Like a moth, you’re drawn to the light. You take a seat in front of the monitor where a single application is running with the text “MURDER” in the text box. Looks like a crappy search engine from a college homework assignment, you think to yourself. You click the Search button anyways. Querying Database and a green sense of progress fills up the bar. A few videos with a brunette appear. She’s been there for more than one day, as her clothes aren’t the same across the videos. It looks like she’s being interrogated. Without warning, without forced motivation, without someone whispering text in front of you face, you sit there watching each video, trying to figure out what this murder is about.

Her Story is probably one of the better story-driven games I’ve played in a while, not because it breaks ground in storytelling but because it leaves the player in complete control of how they unravel the story.

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August 1, 2015 3

EVO 2015 – The Importance of Commentary

Evolution Championship Series (Evo) 2015 just completed this past weekend; a packed Las Vegas ballroom, thousands of contestants across Twelve official games competing to see who’s skillset, in-game knowledge and ability to adapt, and commentators to bring as much insight into the event for the audience as possible. While the event is primarily geared towards the fighting game community, Evo has become a global event where competitors come from around the world, audience fly in from all over to witness the sodium intake and hundreds of thousands more spectator via twitch, YouTube and dozens other restreams.

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July 20, 2015 0

Impressions: Might No 9 – E3 2015, New Mechanics and Forcing Better Pattern Mastery

Might No 9

Release: Sept 15, 2015

Might No 9, the game where Megaman started to rebel against Capcom, the company that began to neglect the robot, so much that he decided to get cosmetic-enhancements done to his mechanic body and embody the 90s cool kid look in our post-3D world.

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June 24, 2015 0

Impressions: Tom Clancy’s The Division – E3 2015

Release: 2016(?)

Tom Clancy’s The (Troll Hard) Division puts you with a group of 3 post-apocalyptic sleeper agents in the midst of a viral epidemic killing off the US population and you have the single goal of looting every player and NPC that you come into contact with. It doesn’t even matter if they were situational allies or members of your own party, if they have a gun that you like, you can shank a fool and take it off of their body. What’s a dead body going to do to protest? Ragdoll in anger? At least, that would be what the E3 demo would lead me to believe that this game is going to play out.

The Open-world cooperative shooter-genre is definitely trying to explore new directions since Borderlands made its debut a few years ago for the closed party format and Destiny released last year as the drop-in drop-out open party format. Troll Hard has both a drop-in-drop out system where parties are automatically dropped into random servers with other random groups already in them but this is the first with a betrayal system that works contains both inter-party and intra-party mechanics.

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June 20, 2015 0

Impressions: Cuphead – E3 2015

Cuphead

Platform: Xbox-one (E3 2015 Build)

Release Date: 2016 (Xbox One, Steam)

Like the 1920s, 30s, and 40s cartoons that the game emulates, Cuphead is an expression of what fun can mean without all of this newfangled futurism. The game is always rhythmic, bouncing to its own beat to keep up the liveliness that it tries to portray, but always extra expressive thanks to the big eyes and big head making it unnecessary to need nuanced, subjective feelings but instantly knowing the anger or anguish from having every possible feature, from the eyes to the hands to the body language shouting out their current state of being.