Clearing Out The Draft Box

For those of you who don’t have a WordPress site of your own, or maybe one that lacks my fancy functionality, it has this ‘draft’ function where if you start writing out an idea, it’ll save it just in case your closing the window wasn’t ‘Oh god, this is a stupid idea,’ but was meant to focus on it later. I’m clearing out my box of drafts to try and organise myself, in light of a half-year of work on this blog. Some of these ideas are just not timely – and some of them are a bit petty in hindsight. I’m going to just list some of them here with a blurb about the idea.

Game Pile stuff

These are all easy. I’m planning on doing these as I play through the games in my pile.

Holy Shit, Mitt Romney Was real

I have a real hard time with this one because there was just so much bizzare, odd, and outrightly unconnected things that happened during the 2012 election campaigning that I’m not surprised there are conspiracy theorists abounding about the topic. Mitt Romney is such a weird man, and his campaign was full of such weird decisions and choices that it was almost impossible to sift down to the ones that are forgotten. Things like the Iowa-shaped steel monument, the fireworks that they didn’t fire, the transition website that went live, insulting a stranger’s cooking, telling a roomfull of unemployed people that he was also unemployed and felt their pain, singing tunelessly about the Amber Waves of Corn, talking about shipping jobs away as a funny anecdote, talking casually about how many cars he owed while trying to connect to poor car owners. It’s really inexplicable just what kind of person he actually is.

Oo! I almost forgot! Remmeber when he appeared on Telemundo, a Spanish-language cable channel, and wore fake tan to look more brown?

Space

A discussion of why while I love Space and the ideas of science fiction, and the trappings and tools of science fiction in storytelling, I don’t actually like any major Space properties. This one probably needs to hold up until I play Mass Effect. What’s sad about that is this month just past was a point of time in which I had planned to play Mass Effect, and which I have now not done. Essentially, it’s just me talking about what it is that bothers me about existing speculative-fiction, space-faring properties, most of which boils down to somehow making high-tech fantastic environments seem boring, or populating it with people I dislike.

Mental Illness As Fodder For Game Mechanics

I thought for a while after playing the Assassins Creed games that I could put together an interesting list of possible stories and game mechanics you could explore using existing psychological problems with a broad overview of accepted psych principles. I spent an afternoon talking to a friend about it – he has a degree in Psych, after all – and realised that I was holy shit out of my depth on it. Rather than fumble through trying to describe things like PTSD, Looping Memory, Auditory Hallucinations, actual Depression and negative feedback loops, I figured it best to set this idea down. This is rich fodder for ideas, but I sure as hell shouldn’t be trying to talk about it authoritively. This isn’t tumblr, after all.

Batman, American Superhero

At first, I was going to talk about the wage disparity between Batman and his Employees – who are basically alien to him. Wage disparity has evolved since the 1930s when the character was first created, and it’s changed what Batman is because the world around him has changed. I think it summarises best in that Batman of 1930 had a budget of about eight times the typical wage; Batman of 2013 has a wage of about 15,000 times that of the typical wage. That’s insane, and it has really removed Batman as a hero of the people. I think it’s pretty interesting to talk about. Iron Man showed up and did the same thing, recently, with his movies making it even worse – watching people talking about Tony Stark tends to provoke even more anger-inducing phrases.

Brendan Behan

Brendan Behan once said that religion was at its strongest when the culture was about a class division. The rich and poor could share the religion, and the Rich could enjoy the benefits of that religion reinforcing the social order. I’d like to remind you that right now, the United States of America is a nation that has a majority that consider the theory of evolution to be incorrect as an explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, and the most cited reason against it is a religious or spiritual intention.

‘Immersive’

What jerks me out of a work. It’s different for everyone, so we say ‘immersive,’ and essentially mean nothing in particular.

Raids and Dungeons

I learned in the life of Mists of Pandaria that the development staff of World of Warcraft have to spend about as much time developing a raid as they do for a dungeon. The architecture, the most consuming component of the development, is more or less the same, just scaled up or down. When raids were less approachable than dungeons, dungeons could be prioritised over raids, and that’s what led to the regular addition of dungeons to the game in the course of an expansion. I like dungeon content, I don’t like raid contents, so: Wah wah wah.

Sustaining A Correction

The idea of zombie concepts; concepts that have critical mass enough that it doesn’t matter how good or how bad they are, but they can continue expanding, turning other franchises into copies of themselves. I have no fucking clue where I was going with this one.

Things You Won’t Like

Recommending things and realising that people aren’t going to like them. Interestingly, this idea eventually developed into my ‘Verdict’ system at the end of my reviews.

The Person of the Gun

Turns out that Extra Credits more or less did this already.

Portal, Batman, Deus Ex

Finally, a discussion of pacing in video games. The way that Arkham Asylum kept me connected to the game, the way that Deus Ex facilitated its fucking-around elements and how Portal managed to make itself into a game that was 90% tutorial and still tightly paced and fun.