1259: Gross

My year and a bit reviewing social and mobile games was enough to make me never, ever want to play one of them ever again, but I feel it is worth educating people on the things that these games are doing — seriously unpleasant things.

I’ll preface this with the caveat that not all social and mobile games do these things. But a huge majority of them do. And you should be aware of it, if you’re not already.

First thing to do is read this.

If you read that, I probably don’t actually need to say any more. But I will anyway.

“Coercive monetization.” Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Well, it is; it’s the practice of convincing players that they “need” to spend money, and that it’s their “choice” to spend money. It’s underhanded trickery, in other words, and it’s massively commonplace in the free-to-play sector — but particularly in the realms of mobile and social games.

That post’s author Ramin Shokrizade describes the use of coercive monetization techniques in relation to “fun pain” — a term coined by Roger Dickey from Zynga to describe games that actively put obstacles in the way of the player’s fun. These could be any of a wide variety of things — an energy system telling them they can’t play any more; a timer saying they can’t use this building/hero/object until it’s been readied/built; an object which is just slightly too expensive, and which is all but necessary to progress. All of these things are used in order to get the player making that all-important first payment — to “convert” them from a freeloading bastard (albeit one with some common sense) into a person blindly willing to continue paying into an obviously manipulative business model while under the illusion of having “fun”.

Shokrizade cites one of my least favourite games ever in his piece — King’s Candy Crush Saga. This game is immensely popular, yet is 1) a Bejeweled ripoff and 2) one of the most manipulative, exploitative, outright unpleasant games I have ever encountered.

It begins innocently enough. You’re given levels that are pretty straightforward to complete, and you’ll make good progress through them. Gradually, they’ll get more difficult, but not noticeably so — not until you reach an artificial barrier on the game map that requires you to either spam your friends with requests or pay real money to progress. Since to many people, spamming one’s friends with Facebook requests is becoming something of a taboo, many choose to pay the $1 fee to progress — but in doing so they break that seal and “convert” themselves into a paying player.

King knows this, and thus makes the levels after this barrier noticeably more difficult. But it doesn’t do this in a fair way; as with Bejeweled (and particularly its free-to-play social counterpart Bejeweled Blitz) Candy Crush Saga is primarily based on luck rather than skill — you can’t plan ahead because you don’t know what’s going to fall from the top of the screen, so more often than not running out of moves is unavoidable. What Candy Crush Saga does as it progresses is weight the behind-the-scenes random number generators significantly against the player so it will be very difficult for them to progress without paying up for boosts, or extra lives, or permanent upgrades, many of which are extremely expensive.

You may feel that there’s no harm in this, and indeed some people make it a badge of personal pride to play through something like Candy Crush Saga without paying a penny. But in the process, they’re having a frustrating, boring experience. Why would you deliberately do that to yourself, when you can pay, say, $1 for the iOS version of Bejeweled and have literally infinitely more fun than with Candy Crush Saga?

These manipulative business models are not harmless, nor are they worthy of praise, regardless of how many millions of dollars they’re bringing in every day. They’re making money from conning gullible idiots — and while some of you may argue that people with no common sense need to be woken up a bit, it’s not really fair to take advantage of people in this manner, particularly when many of them are children.

I find the whole practice utterly reprehensible, and I can’t help hoping that the whole bubble on free-to-play social and mobile games bursts very soon. Unfortunately, with the amount of money many of the more popular titles are making every day — and the sheer number of the bastard things that are released each day — I don’t see that happening any time soon, making mobile gaming in particular all but a lost cause for me these days.

Do yourself a favour: if you’re currently playing something like Candy Crush Saga or its ilk, stop. You’re being manipulated. Find a low-cost game with the same mechanics, pay for it, then play it as much as you want. This is the way it’s always been in the past, and I long to go back to a time where that is the only model.

“Coercive monetization” is gross. It is borderline unethical. So don’t support it.

1258: Crossing Over

After a bit of time playing Animal Crossing, I think I sort of “get it” now.

Well, as much as it is possible to “get it”, anyway.

See, the thing with Animal Crossing is that it is precisely what you make of it. If you want to play it as a financial management sim and try to get all the upgrades to your house as quickly as possible, you can do that. If you want to play it as a collectathon game, attempting to fill the in-game encylopaedia and museum as well as your virtual house with everything the game has to offer, you can. If you simply want to play it as a means of chilling out for a bit without any pressure… well, you can do that, too.

The nice thing is that it doesn’t railroad you into any of these activities. It encourages you to try things for yourself and see what you enjoy. There’s no obligation to keep doing the same thing over and over again — though you’ll find that there are certain things that are more enjoyable or profitable to do more often than others. The game also keeps introducing things at a good pace as you play, too — new characters, new shops, new gameplay options — and continues doing so months and months after you started playing. It really is quite impressive how much content there is packed into a game that is ostensibly about nothing at all.

One of the things I never really explored in my last encounter with the series on the DS was the multiplayer stuff, and I believe that the 3DS version adds a considerable amount more depth to the multiplayer — i.e. you can actually see each other, wander around together and interact with one another. This is surprisingly entertaining, though it’s a little frustrating that some game mechanics simply “switch off” when other players are visiting, leaving you unable to take advantage of them.

I played for a bit with Andie earlier, and it was great fun. We wandered around her town together, then took a boat trip over to her town’s tropical island, and played some of the “Tour” minigames, in which you cooperate with one another to achieve various tasks — catch a certain number of bugs, retrieve and reassemble fossils, fish a certain number of fish. The nice thing about these games is that they encourage you to work together to a certain degree, but also provide a mild competitive element in that whoever “worked harder” gets a slightly larger reward at the end of the game. It’s not a massive extra reward, no, but it’s enough to put a nice competitive spin on things and keep them interesting.

I’m certainly enjoying it now — for a while after starting to play I was wondering if I was actually enjoying myself when I was playing, but I’m well and truly into the groove now. I’m interested to see how my little town develops over time, and how the game grows, changes and evolves — and the nice thing is, because so many other people are playing the game at present, it’s possible to share all this fun with other people. It’s a social game in the very truest sense, and one that encourages people to laugh, play and enjoy themselves together, rather than simply to spam each other with facile Facebook wall posts.

Good job, Nintendo.

1257: You Ess Gee

I’m really happy with the way USgamer is going.

Lest you’ve somehow missed me going on about it, USgamer is my new job. It is the American counterpart to the well-established European gaming site Eurogamer, but it is absolutely not a reskinned Eurogamer. It is its own beast, and the small team we have working on it are carving out a great little niche.

In order for a new gaming site to make sense in this crowded content marketplace, it needs to offer something different and interesting. There are already far too many sites doing the “daily news, occasional previews and reviews” thing, and after a while they become all but interchangeable. That’s not to say that there’s anything inherently wrong with that model, but there are already a whole bunch of well-established sites out there that do that, and so jumping head-first into the fray and hoping to compete is, frankly, lunacy.

Instead, what we’re doing with USgamer is a combination of original reporting and personal, opinionated editorial pieces. The news that has already been covered by other sites gets put into our front-page “feed”, allowing us to acknowledge that things have happened but not waste any time on rewriting things that have already been written five or six times over — and will be rewritten several hundred more times by the time the day is over. This frees us up to write interesting features, interviews, reviews, previews and opinion pieces, with a strong focus on us writing in our own personal “voices” in order to provoke discussion. It’s the kind of site I’d like to read if I weren’t actively writing for it; in fact, I still read the stuff my colleagues write and comment on it, and we’re building a very pleasant little community in the process.

This is the first time I’ve really been present at the birth of a website like this. I was around when my brother launched the now-defunct What They Play, but in a freelance capacity rather than as a regular staffer, so I didn’t really get to see in detail how the community built up and responded to things. With USgamer, however, it’s interesting to observe the new community members showing up, tentatively commenting, engaging in discussions and subsequently growing in confidence, becoming regular posters in the process.

It’s early days yet — our most commented-on piece has about 30 comments or so, which is a fraction of what a fairly throwaway story on Eurogamer attracts on a daily basis — but we’re setting a good groundwork. By having high-quality stuff on the site at this early stage and actively participating in discussions with the community, we’re setting high expectations both for ourselves and our readers, and I really think that’s going to pay off in the long term. We’re never going to be a Kotaku, but we’re not trying to be; Kotaku posts far too much stuff to keep up with in a single day anyway.

Basically, I’m having a blast with it so far, and I hope you like it too. On the off-chance you haven’t taken a peek just yet, get thee hence, even if you’re not an American. You might just like what you see.

1256: V for Victory

Been playing a bit more Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory this evening. While the newest game is, as I mentioned a few days ago, more of an evolution from mk2 than the revolution that mk2 was over the original, I’m starting to notice some more pronounced differences — differences that make it abundantly clear Idea Factory and Compile Heart are both receptive to feedback and keen to iterate on their past work in order to make things better in subsequent installments.

Let’s take Victory’s battle system as an example. At first glance, it appears almost identical to mk2’s mechanics. On a single character’s turn, they can move within a set radius according to their Move stat (which tends to be improved from its per-character baseline value via equipment rather than increased through levelling up) and, if they can reach an enemy, they may attack it. Different weapons have different “threat” areas, meaning that some are designed for focusing on a single enemy, while others have long areas that can attack enemies in a line; others can “sweep” in a wide arc in front of the character. Usually, you can position yourself in such a way that it’s possible to hit two or more enemies at once for the most efficient combat. There are three different “types” of attack — Rush attacks hit more times, Power attacks are stronger (and often magical) and Break attacks have a stronger effect on the enemy’s “Guard Points” bar, which, when depleted, causes them to take more damage.

In these respects, the two battle systems are identical. But from hereon, they diverge somewhat. Today I am going to talk in detail about how they are different from one another. A good proportion of you will not find this in the slightest bit interesting, and I make absolutely no apologies whatsoever for that. I’m going to talk about it anyway.

In mk2, the amount of attacks a single character could perform in a turn was determined by their “AP” (Ability Points) value. Each attack they performed cost a set number of ability points to perform, and the character could continue attacking until they had run out. Alternatively, it was also possible to finish the combo early and “bank” some AP for the following turn — in order to perform some of the special moves, this was necessary, as the AP cost was more than the character’s baseline maximum AP in many cases. If a combo spent over a particular number of AP in a single turn, an “EX” move became possible, which tended to be more powerful, hit more times or have some sort of special effect.

In Victory, meanwhile, the AP system has been removed entirely, and each character’s combo in a turn may only ever consist of up to four moves. (At least, this is true at the early stage I’m at, anyway.) The big difference comes in how you assign the Rush, Power and Break moves to each character; rather than being able to assign any unlocked moves at will and being able to perform them if you had enough AP, Victory gives each move a “CP” (Combo Points) cost, and each character an allowance of CP that gradually increases as they level up. Early in the game, there are not enough CP available to fill all possible slots in the command list, meaning that you’re forced to think a bit more carefully about each character’s strengths and weaknesses when prioritising which moves they should have available.

This is a very simple and straightforward change to mk2’s system, but it works incredibly well. While I enjoyed fighting in mk2, there was relatively little to differentiate between a lot of the different characters, special moves aside. In Victory, meanwhile, it becomes possible (and indeed necessary) to specialise characters in each of the three types of attack, then make them work as a team to take down enemies. For example, my current party contains Plutia, who is weak at physical attacks (particularly Rushes) but has some strong elemental-infused Power attacks and is also very good at Break attacks; Neptune, who is a fairly well-rounded character I have focusing on Rush attacks; and Noire, who I have using some strong Power attacks.

With this configuration, I can have Plutia run in and wear down the enemy’s guard, then Neptune and Noire can step in for the kill. Noire does more damage with her power attacks; Neptune’s Rush attacks cause the “EX meter” to rise quicker. When said meter reaches particular boundaries, strong “EX Finisher” moves become available, allowing for slightly longer combos with special effects at the end. Later in the game, the EX meter can also be used to unleash extremely powerful special attacks, though doing so depletes it, unlike the Finisher moves.

Another big change comes in the SP (Skill Point) system. In mk2, SP, which were used to cast spells and/or allow the characters to transform into their more powerful “Hard Drive Divinity” forms, gradually charged up as the characters took and received damage. In Victory, they start a dungeon expedition with a full bar, which gradually depletes as special abilities are used. In this sense, it’s more like a traditional bank of magic points, which is arguably a little less creative but works somewhat better. The SP system of mk2 nerfed the Hard Drive Divinity feature significantly in that it was often only possible to remain transformed for a turn or two at a time, which didn’t seem quite in keeping with the supposedly awesome power of these “CPU” goddesses. In Victory, meanwhile, you can transform at the start of a fight and remain comfortably in HDD for quite some time — what you have to take into account here instead is managing your stock of SP over the course of the whole dungeon, rather than within the individual fight.

These few changes to Victory’s battle system help make a game that initially seems rather similar actually quite distinct from its predecessor, which is very much a good thing. The enemies have been buffed up somewhat, too, meaning that you have to work quite hard to defeat some of them, and many of them are more than capable of giving you a good smack in the face in return. I don’t remember getting a Game Over more than once or twice over the course of mk2; less than 10 hours into Victory and I’ve already had 4 or 5, and all of them have been my own stupid fault rather than the game being cheap. This is a good sign — while piss-easy combat has its appeal, it’s nice to have a bit of challenge now and then.

Anyway. Suffice to say I am enjoying Victory so far and have little doubt that I will spend an obscene amount of time on seeing everything it has to offer in the long term. I am, however, a bit put out that my favourite character IF doesn’t seem to be in this one very much! Oh well. You can’t have everything, and Plutia is kind of adorable in a dopey sort of way. Also, Noire still makes me weak at the knees. “I-it’s not like I’m lonely or anything…!”

1255: A Realm Reborn, Redux

I really, really like Final Fantasy XIV.

There, I said it.

It may not be fashionable to like a new (well, rebooted) MMORPG that steadfastly follows the old-school subscription model, but given the alternative is the inherent restrictions and inconveniences of the free-to-play model or the regular badgering to check out the “cash shop” in pay-once-play-forever games, I’ll take a few quid a month on the promise of gradually-evolving content.

I’m not going to rabbit on about the game itself here — I’ve already written two articles over at USgamer on that very subject — but I do want to talk about one thing I’m quite looking forward to: the game’s social aspect.

A touch of context here: I have a pretty wide circle of friends, but unfortunately the vast majority of them are scattered across the globe, from California to Japan and everywhere (well, not everywhere) in between. I get to see the friends I have in the local vicinity every so often and we have a good time, but 1) I don’t necessarily get to hang out with them as often as I’d like — none of us are in our twenties any more — and 2) not all of them are into the same things as me.

One thing I’m looking forward to with Final Fantasy XIV is the opportunity to make new friends. But I have some personal struggles to overcome in order to make that happen.

As longtime followers will know, I suffer from a degree of social anxiety, particularly when confronted with strangers. I worry a lot about what people will think of me, and my low self-esteem and low opinion of my physical appearance causes me to immediately believe people will think the worst of me.

So strong is this issue — and yes, I know I should do something about it; that’s not really the issue here — that I’ve been surprised to discover myself having the same feelings of anxiety when playing online games. I’m actively afraid of voice chat with strangers, for example — a hangover from when I was young and really, really hated the sound of my own voice — and I even find myself hesitant to do what I feel would be “butting in” to online conversations in virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life. I haven’t hung out in Second Life for a very long time, but on more than one occasion I behaved in that virtual world’s virtual clubs exactly the same way as I did in real clubs; I’d sit or stand at the side of the room, watching everyone, and wondering what it would be like to talk to that person over there, who I found quite attractive, or that person over there, who was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a design based on something I found interesting.

Well, I feel like I need to take control of this somewhat. While my issues with interpersonal interactions with strangers in “reality” are a more deep-seated issue that probably requires a degree of professional help (or at least a lot of self-discipline), I can do more about the online thing. I chat with people with no problem on Twitter, for example, and pretty much every means of online communication has some form of “safety net” where you can either “escape” from an uncomfortable situation or “mute” people who are bothering you. Chances are I won’t need to use either of those things, but the knowledge that they’re there is comforting.

So where does Final Fantasy XIV fit into all this, then? Well, once the current phase of the beta test ends and the characters everyone starts playing as become “permanent,” I intend on actually making some new friends. I want to play with other people; I want to enjoy the game together with people who like it as much as I do.

I’ve been hesitant to join “guilds” or equivalents in MMOs in the past because I fear not being able to commit to the regular play schedules that they often require. But the more I think about it, the more I think it might be something worth pursuing. After all, at present, I have no regular “social” event in my weekly calendar; my board gaming nights with my best “real-life” friends are sporadic and irregular, and hanging out with everyone else tends to be a more “spur of the moment” thing. Why shouldn’t playing Final Fantasy XIV be some sort of regular, albeit electronic, social event, in which I can get to know people and hopefully make some good friends? Stranger things have happened.

The reason I’m picking Final Fantasy XIV for this purpose? Because Final Fantasy XI is, out of all the MMOs I’ve tried over the years — and that’s quite a lot — the one in which I found people whom I most enjoyed hanging out with virtually. I have no idea where the delightfully entertaining “Bendix” and “Nefertari” are now, but I do quite often find myself missing them. Obviously having some friends a long time ago in a completely different game is no guarantee that the same thing will happen in Final Fantasy XIV, but it’s as good a starting point as any, I figure. I’ve long since abandoned all hope of getting existing friends to play with me in an MMO, because it’s impossible to coordinate.

It remains to be seen whether this plan is successful once the game enters open beta and rolls ever-onward towards its August launch. But I feel strangely optimistic about this coming opportunity to meet some new virtual people; I can represent myself however I want in the game, with no-one pre-judging anything about me besides my character’s name and their appearance. And since everyone in Final Fantasy land is impossibly attractive in that distinctively “Japanese video game” sort of way, I don’t even really have to worry about that, unless I accidentally call myself Pooface McScruntyflange. Which I probably won’t.

Anyway, in the meantime, rest assured that Final Fantasy XIV is shaping up to be something actually quite special, and I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into the game as a whole for realsies. Enthusiastic blog posts will undoubtedly follow once my “real” character is born.

1254: I Typed This Post (Except the Title) With My Eyes Shut

I’ve always been pretty good at touch-typing, so I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see how well I could type a blog post with my eyes shut. This is the result. I apologise in advance if it is completely indecipherable.

It’s interesting, doing this, because it makes me realise how much I rely on muscle memory while I’m typing. I can visualise where the keys are in my head, which is all very well and good, but I can’t tell whether or not I’ve made any typos in the process.

Actually, I sort of can. I can “feel” when I’ve typed something incorrectly (assuming my hands were in the right place in the first place) but going back to correct it when you’re not looking at the screen is actually somewhat difficult.

I wonder how well I’m doing. More to the point, I wonder how many words I’ve typed so far.

I learned to touch-type when I was very young. I learned through the use of an Atari 8-bit computer and the use of computer magazines, which in the 80s tended to include type-in listing s for games and various other bits and pieces each month.

If you’re too young to know what a type-in listing is, it’s this: a program is printed in the magazine, and if you copy it into your computer’s programming language BASIC and run it, you’d have a fully-functional program of some sort to play with — usually a game.

Usually these programs were written in BASIC so you could see how they worked and adapt them for your own purposes. However, sometimes they were written in machine code, which meant they were nothing but a string of numbers in hexadecimal format. Not something you can decipher at all, really.

Anyway, the reason I am so good (hopefully) at touch-typing today as I (possibly) am is because I spent so long copying these listings into my Atari. I’d type with my hands on the keyboard while simultaneously looking at the magazine. The magazines I read came with a special program that checked for typos when you were copying out listings, so you could make sure you’d copied everything exactly.

Anyway, through the process of copying out these programs while not looking at either the keyboard or the screen, I learned to touch-type pretty well.

I hope I haven’t embarrassed myself by this post being completely indecipherable. I am also coming up with this nonsense on the spur of the moment like a freewriting exercise; I didn’t plan anything beforehand. So hopefully you’ll forgive the stream of consciousness that is currently erupting from my fingers.

I wonder how many words this is now. It feels a bit weird to be sitting here with my eyes closed. I’m actually quite sleepy, so I hope I don’t suddenly fall asleep in the middle of typing this. I’ve had a few cups of coffee at my friend Tim’s house this evening, though, so that’s probably unlikely for an hour or two at least.

We’ll see.

Anyway, I think I’m probably running out of patience for this little exercise, so I’m going to sign off at this point and publish the post as-is. If you can’t read it because I’ve made too many mistakes, please bear in mind that I was typing it with my eyes closed. Can you do any better? Show me in the comments if so.

That’s enough. Enough. STOP!

1253: Nepgagaga the Third

As I mentioned yesterday, alongside Atelier Rorona, I’m also finally getting around to playing the third Hyperdimension Neptunia game, Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory.

For those who haven’t read my numerous enthusiastic rants on the previous entries in this much-berated series, allow me to get you up to speed.

The first Hyperdimension Neptunia was critically panned for numerous reasons, but I found myself enjoying it a huge amount despite its crap 3D graphics, repetitive gameplay and clunky mechanics. It established some immensely endearing characters, and it was largely this fact that encouraged me to check out the subsequent entry in the series.

Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 was more of a reboot than a sequel, since it didn’t really acknowledge the first game existed. It was superior in almost every respect — better graphics (though the frame rate was still on the low side), an almost infinitely better battle system, more streamlined mechanics and massively better music — but kept the things that were good about the original game: the wry, self-referential sense of humour; the endearing, memorable characters; the amusing setting; the gorgeous 2D art. It was one of the few games I actively wanted to play all the way through and see every single bit of content it had to offer — including the surprisingly dark “conquest” ending that took a considerable amount of effort to unlock.

Now, I’m playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, the third game in the series. This is more evolution from mk2 than the revolution that mk2 was over the original, but that’s fine; I loved mk2, so I’m happy to effectively play it again with a bunch of refinements. The adorably ditzy Neptune is back in the lead role this time around, after giving up the spotlight to her sister Nepgear in the previous game, and there’s been a strong focus on the rather tsundere girl who represents the PlayStation platform, Noire so far in what I’ve played. (This is absolutely fine by me, as I have a total crush on Noire.)

I’m still quite early in the new game so far, so I’m hesitant to comment on it too much. What I instead wanted to mention was an Extra Credits episode I watched earlier today, in which the different between game mechanics, the dynamics they create and the aesthetic reasons to play were explored. It got me thinking about the various JRPGs I’ve been playing recently, and how not all of them would appeal to everyone — even among JRPG fans.

Given the diversity of the games industry today, it’s very difficult and not particularly helpful to say that you’re a fan of a specific “genre” of games any more, because these genres exclusively describe game mechanics. “I like RPGs,” people will say, implying that they like games that involve hit points, statistics and equipment. And yet if I plonked Skyrim’s biggest fan down in front of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, they’d probably look at me in disgust, walk out then never speak to me ever again. (I’m seeing my friend Tim tomorrow night, who is possibly the biggest Skyrim fan in the world; I might try it. Though he probably won’t walk out of his own house in disgust.)

What we should actually start doing a little more is considering our tastes with regard to things like subject matter, mood and the aesthetics described in the Extra Credits piece. Hyperdimension Neptunia doesn’t appeal to me because it’s a JRPG — though I enjoy those mechanics and the related play aesthetics — it appeals to me because of its characters; because of its bright colours; because of its light-hearted nature and refusal to let you take it seriously. We’re talking about a series of games where one special attack allows you to summon Keiji Inafune in the form of a sword, then hit things with it; and another where a girl using an electric guitar as a weapon smacks an enemy into a giant microwave and then turns it on for massive damage. We’re talking about a series of games in which Sega, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft’s gaming platforms are personified as a series of young girls who rather aptly embody many of their inspirations’ key characteristics.

Despite superficial similarities, I wouldn’t necessarily expect someone who enjoyed, say, Ar Tonelico to enjoy Hyperdimension Neptunia — though there may be some crossover. (I love both, for example!) Ar Tonelico has its light-hearted moments but, for the most part, takes itself reasonably seriously; Neptunia, meanwhile, is flippant and silly. Both are emotionally engaging but in completely different ways; Ar Tonelico is dramatic and affecting; Neptunia feels like hanging out with old friends.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to playing more of Neptunia V, particularly as the story seems to have some interesting, mind-bending twists this time around. It’s early days yet, but I’m already having a blast, and I anticipate spending a considerable amount of time on this game.

1252: The Alchemist of Arland

Now Ar Tonelico is over and done with, I’ve been able to start up some other games without guilt. Specifically, I made a start on Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory today, which I’ll talk about in more detail in a day or two, as well as Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland.

This is my first encounter with the Atelier series. I do, in fact, own all three PS2 games (known as Atelier Iris) and all three PS3 Arland games (Atelier Rorona, Atelier Totori and Atelier Meruru) plus the first entry in the new Dusk series (Atelier Ayesha), but this is my first time playing them — they’re all games that I picked up when I saw good deals a while back, and subsequently added them to my stack of Stuff I’d Like to Play at Some Indefinite Point in the Future.

From what I understand, each “subseries” in the Atelier franchise as a whole does things markedly differently. The PS2 games, from what I can make out, appear to be rather more conventional JRPGs with a lot of game mechanics brought across from the Ar Tonelico series — no bad thing. The PS3 games, meanwhile, if Atelier Rorona is anything to go by, are an interesting twist — and not at all what I expected.

In Atelier Rorona, you play the titular heroine, a young girl with a bit of a self-confidence problem. Rorona is currently employed in an alchemy workshop as a means of paying off a debt to the alchemist Astrid. Rorona is a lovely girl, but unfortunately Astrid is not particularly popular, and as such the kingdom of Arland is doing its level best to get her workshop shut down so factories can be built on its location. It’s up to you to make sure that doesn’t happen.

On the surface, Atelier Rorona resembles a fairly straightforward JRPG. You have big-eyed anime characters who chat to each other at great length via the medium of 2D emote portraits, text and voice acting. You have hit points, experience and levels. You have “dungeons”. But it’s not a JRPG. No, in fact, it’s actually more of a strategy/management game, in which the most important thing is not pushing through the story or powerlevelling your characters, but instead making careful — very careful — use of your time.

The flow of gameplay in Atelier Rorona is pretty straightforward. Roughly every three months or so of in-game time, you’re given an assignment by the kingdom of Arland; meet the deadline and everything’s fine, but fail to meet the requirements and your alchemy workshop will be shut down, prompting an immediate Game Over. The assignments generally require you to turn in items of one or more different types, with your overall evaluation score for the assignment as a whole being calculated on a combination of the number of items you submitted in total, their quality, and the variety of different types of item you submitted.

Completing assignments isn’t the only thing you have to do, though. No, as well as ensuring that your workshop survives for the next three months, you also have to try and improve its dreadful reputation by taking on smaller-scale quests for the local populace, and improve your relationship with your friends by taking on quests for them. And in the meantime, you need ingredients, of course, so you’ll need to spend a few days every so often going on a jaunt into the forest/ruins/mines to go and collect things. And in order to protect themselves on said jaunts, your party needs equipment, of course, which means you need to synthesise the raw materials needed then take them to the friendly local blacksmith to forge them into something new.

It’s initially overwhelming, but once you get into the groove of prioritising what you need to do vs. what you want to do, it’s a lot of fun.

What I find particularly interesting is that while it’s clearly a strategy game, its approach to things is very different to the high level of abstraction found in Western games. Were this a Western-developed game based on the same premise, you’d be spending a lot of time in abstract menus, dragging icons around and that sort of thing. Combat would perhaps be resolved automatically. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, of course; it’s just a little too dry for my tastes. Which is why I appreciate the amount of time and effort which Gust has made to infuse Atelier Rorona’s tiny world with a great deal of character.

In order to do various things, you need to wander around town and visit people. In the process, you’ll stumble across things happening on various occasions, with further events happening according to your friendship level with your various party members. We get a strong feeling of who Rorona is and how she relates to the people around her, not to mention a strong sense of unfolding narrative, but the core gameplay is straight up hardcore strategy/management.

It’s actively stressful to play, but enjoyable in the process; there’s just enough light relief with the characters and story sequences to keep things interesting. I’m already very much enamoured with the Rorona’s rather tsundere best friend Cordelia, who hasn’t explicitly said so yet, but clearly has a big chip on her shoulder about her short stature. I’m looking forward to the inevitable explosion about that at some point, but in the meantime I have a batch of incense to make that just won’t wait…

1251: Bottomless Memory for Irrelevant Nonsense

I have, as the title suggests, a bottomless memory for completely irrelevant nonsense. I’m not sure how or why I have developed this particular characteristic, and it very rarely comes in handy, but there it is.

Occasionally it is a good icebreaker when hanging out with people that I have known for many years, as coming out with something that apparently only I remember often makes people laugh. And, as we all know, making people laugh is a good means of keeping a social situation going. (There are only so many times you can get away with starting a story with “Do you remember when…?” in a single gathering, however.)

I have no idea what causes my brain to remember the things it does, however. Let me give you an example, and you’ll see that there’s really no reason I should remember this particular incident.

When I was at school, a member of my main friendship group was a kid called Daniel. His main distinguishing features were his crooked teeth and his very outgoing, borderline insane nature — the latter of which frequently came to a head in Drama lessons. (An unrelated memory to the one I’m about to recount is the time my friends and I put together a short play called “The Time Trial of Dr. Paradox” in which Daniel played the titular villain, whose crowning moment was when he screamed “I want him tracked down by 2400 hours!” and knocked a small globe onto the floor, causing it to go rolling away and make our mutual friend Andrew almost piss himself with laughter.)

Our drama teacher for one year was actually also our school’s headmaster at the time, one Mr Cragg. Mr Cragg was a pleasant sort of middle-aged man, all beard and jovial nature. He would have made a good Father Christmas if his hair was white. He enjoyed playing theatre games in Drama lessons, and one day we were playing one that involved fruit. I don’t remember the exact game itself, but the bit of the memory I have inexplicably clung on to in the intervening 15+ years is the way in which Mr Cragg said the word “raspberry” (“Razzzberri!”), which my aforementioned friend Daniel found immensely amusing for weeks afterwards. He also found the word “Bilberry” similarly amusing, but that’s fair enough; I found it quite amusing, too, because it sounded a bit like “dildo”.

Well, okay, not really, but we were in our early teens; I’m not even going to pretend we had a particularly sophisticated sense of humour.

What puzzles me is how and why that memory has endured for so long. Why on Earth do I remember the way my old headmaster said the word “raspberry,” and the fact my friend Daniel found it incredibly amusing? I find it difficult to believe that if I ever saw Daniel again — I haven’t seen him since leaving school — that if I walked up to him and went “Razzzberri!” he’d have the slightest fucking clue what I was on about.

Ah well. I suppose it makes for good stories. Or at least confusing ones.

1250: Anger Leads to Suffering

I’ve been back on Twitter for a little while. I know I said I wouldn’t, but for professional reasons, it made sense to have it as a means of communication now I’m on USgamer — I’ve already managed to get in touch with a number of different devs and write stories thanks to that bloody service.

Twitter remains infuriating, however, because people still don’t quite seem to get that 140 characters is not a good amount of space in which to have a discussion. You can spill over into more and more tweets and rant on and on, but as soon as you start spamming like that, people switch off.

The other thing that Twitter encourages is kneejerk, usually furious responses. Sometimes these are justified; other times, all they do is damage the perception of the people who are trying to make otherwise coherent arguments.

By far the most consistently-occurring issues that come up in my Twitter feed are matters relating to any and all of sexism, feminism and transphobia in particular. As I’ve said on numerous occasions in the past, I support the causes that these people are trying to forward: women are just as awesome as men and should be treated as such; a person is a person, regardless of biological sex and/or gender, and shouldn’t be treated as a second-class citizen based on prejudice; most importantly, just don’t be a dick.

However, where the people campaigning for these things lose me is in their behaviour when it comes to advancing their causes. I do not and will not believe that the best way to enact change is to get really fucking angry at something, mock people who don’t subscribe to your exact viewpoint and then publicly shame people repeatedly until they clam up and don’t want to say anything. That shit is viral — if you behave that way, people will see the way you act towards others, and that in turn will make them not want to engage in discussions we should all feel confident and good about having. In trying to further a cause of equality and encouraging oppressed minorities to stand up for themselves, in other words, you’re actually silencing people in the process. It doesn’t matter whether those people you silence are the “privileged” — usually white men — because all you’re doing is… doing what you want people to stop doing. Do you see where the problem is, here?

Most recently, Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade attracted the ire of these particularly vocal people on Twitter by making some ill-advised and ill-informed comments about transgender people. This isn’t the first time he’s said something stupid, and it probably won’t be the last. I honestly believe he’s not saying these things from a position of genuine hatred; he’s just naturally a jerk towards a lot of people — and, as he notes in an apology on Penny Arcade, the first time these issues raised their heads he wasn’t even aware of many of them. To be fair to him for a moment here, I knew absolutely nothing about transgender people at all prior to this year, either; the subject simply hadn’t come up, so it’s not at all unreasonable to assume that he hadn’t come into contact with this particular group of people before and thus didn’t know the “appropriate” or “acceptable” ways in which to talk about them.

There’s a degree of common sense required here, of course, which Krahulik didn’t always display, particularly as the most recent incident was actually the second time he had run headlong into being perceived as “transphobic”, but for him to be immediately labelled a “bigot”, a “sexist” and outright insulted is, frankly, a little much. People don’t teach you these things. (Well, perhaps they do now; it’s a long time since I was at school and took a Humanities lesson.) And as such, when people are confronted with unfamiliar things, sometimes mistakes are made; things are said without thinking; sometimes offence is caused. The appropriate response to someone making a mistake is to point out that they made a mistake and then educate them so they don’t do it again in the future.

Key point: both the pointing out of the mistake and the education should be done in a calm, respectful manner that acknowledges ignorance isn’t the same as bigotry. If your first response to someone saying something that you believe is offensive is to start swearing at and insulting them, then of course they are going to get defensive and start flinging mud back at you rather than attempting to engage with you — particularly if they don’t understand what they did wrong in the first place, however silly that might seem to you as someone more well-informed.

It’s a natural response; look at how children respond to being yelled at as opposed to having positive behaviour reinforced, or calm explanations as to why the thing they were doing was inappropriate. These reflex behaviours continue well into adulthood for many of us; no-one likes to feel like they did wrong, so the more aggressively people shout and scream, the more the recipient of the ire will dig their heels in and just escalate the whole situation. In Krahulik’s case, this happened previously with the “rape culture/dickwolves” incident a while back — people yelled, he got defensive, discussion was shut down before it could begin — and again with this more recent incident.

There are a number of sad things about this whole situation. Krahulik could have had the opportunity to learn about part of culture he’s unfamiliar with, but the immediately aggressive response shut down any hope of rational discussion and education and caused him to get defensive. The aggressive response didn’t stop, either; it grew and grew into a seething ball of hatred, with people referring to him and his Penny Arcade partner Jerry Holkins (who had remained very quiet throughout this whole debacle — a sign which some saw as tacit approval of Krahulik’s actions) as “dicks” and other, far more spiteful terms. People started calling for boycotts of PAX. One indie developer even publicly pulled out of PAX’s indie showcase.

None of this had to happen, and it is not solely Krahulik’s fault that it did. He’s not blameless at all, no, but I place as much blame for the subsequent fallout squarely at the feet of the people who did the aggressive yelling, the swearing, the insults, the death threats as I do at the feet of Krahulik. This could have been an opportunity for everyone involved to grow; instead, it was just yet another sign that people like nothing more than a good fight rather than actually talking and educating one another. And I worry that serious damage has been done on all sides of this issue; there are no winners here.

The really sad thing, I think, is how much this sort of thing erects barriers between people. Every time I see something like this happening, I feel genuinely afraid to open my mouth for fear of saying something that will make everyone hate me; and that little nagging voice in the back of my head says “you’re not allowed to have an opinion on this; you’re a privileged white male”. I have seen how quickly people can turn on someone for one little thing that they said, and no-one will ever back down or attempt to understand or educate. It’s just shout, shout shout. It kills discussion. It kills education. And it achieves the absolute opposite of what many of these “social justice” types are supposedly fighting for; instead of promoting inclusivity and harmony, it sows discord and excludes people. We’re better than that.

So everyone, try a little harder to get along and understand one another, please.