So I've stopped listening at 4:53 because even though I don't own a console, I still harbour hopes of playing it (edit: Read Dead) one day. Is there another point later on that's safe to skip to or do you continue to reference whatever point you make with Red Dead for the rest of the episode?
Shame, because I'm finding it interesting what you're saying and I want to see what else you end up saying. I really do agree with you that these 'moments' are what really make games special and set apart the great ones. Tone, atmosphere, environment, aesthetic are aspects of games that contribute in a lower key and more gradual way to creating satisfaction with a game and I don't want to downplay them, but those 'moments' create these great peaks of satisfaction and enjoyment and are the things that often stick with you. I'm also fascinated by them in that they seem such fragile things to me in terms of effectively setting them up so the majority of players get the most out of them. The designers have to be reading the player's mind (or playtesting and hearing it from the horse's mouth) and it's so easy for the player to just not be thinking in the right way and remembering the right piece of background info that's necessary to 'get' the moment. Example from my own experience ... Far Cry 2 ending phase ***SPOILER***: there's a part where your buddies who supported you through the whole game suddenly betray you ( you can watch that here) and that's a really big deal because the whole game has lead up to that in a way with so much time spent working with your buddies - it really should be a brilliant use of the actual player experience and gameplay supporting plot shifts and making them really matter and it clearly has worked for many people which is the reason why that linked video comes from Anthony Burch who uses it as an example of a successful implementation of game narrative I believe. However, when I played that sequence I bent over the dead man and was looking at him and when the unseen buddy goes "why are we here just shoot him" I misheard that and thought it was the first buddy telling me to shoot the guy on the ground and was thinking that maybe he wasn't dead. Basically I ended up just getting a bit confused, didn't see the other buddies coming around because I wasn't looking in their direction and so didn't recognise it to be this sudden reveal of a conspiracy that was supposed to occur in my brain ... the realisation just didn't click into my brain as it was supposed to ... as it was designed to. I eventually worked out what the game was trying to convey to me but by that point it no longer was able to function as the satisfying/surprising pay off that moment was suppose to be, all because I wasn't looking in the right direction, thought one character said something another one was, and was just a bit slow on the uptake. That's the fragility of trying to set up such moments and it's a huge sadness to me because so much of the game (many hours) was clearly designed to lead up to this point and it just got lost like that. Of course the fact that you the player are genuinely in control there makes it more/ would have made it more meaningful if it had worked. Portal 2 in the moment you describe limits the player view to just 1 angle to avoid the player just looking in the wrong direction like I did in Far Cry 2 but I was aware of that when playing and it made it slightly less satisfying because I knew this was exactly what the game was forcing me to do rather than having chosen to do it out of my own invention from a range of options.
Well there's an anecdote for you to chew on. Could probably write more about the issues you were starting to raise but I'll leave it there for now.
Just listening to it again, I feel like I'm talking to slowly in this one. Should I speed up, or is this slower pace helpful?
The whole ending of Farcry 2 is really interesting to me. I actually brought it up at GDC and got applause for my long and slightly off-topic rant about how they bollocksed up the every end part. Anywho, that is an interesting example in that it follows normal narrative lines a bit more, but does a decent job of putting the player inside that story. The one issue that I have with it is that they never really characterized those NPCs as much as I would have liked. Like you, I also didn't really clue in to what was going on until mid-way through the sequence.
As for Portal 2, I kind of feel like I ALWAYS have the experience of "Well that was just what I was supposed to do anyway." It is interesting, however, that you had that during the PIPP and not immediately after like I did. That's definitely something that needs to be kept in mind, and if they had provided some red-herring solutions but made the correct one most prominent that probably wouldn't have happened. I get why they did it the way that they did, but it could have been even better than it was.
02:00 If you're buying sausages in a can then stop buying them.
You really hate on marketing in this one, it's kinda flippant and supercilious- and also cliche. The thing about Portal 2 was really just a case of them putting a crosshair and the gun onscreen in the middle of a cutscene. I mean duhh, that means "you should shoot now". That's REALLY how they got you to shoot at that point.
@I_smell: Hey... I'm one of your investors, you have to agree with me about everything. It's the law or something.
I am a socialist and loathe the marketing driven nature of our culture. This is probably not the time to get into that though...
The thing is, it's not just about making the player do the thing. It's also the player's confidence that it is the thing that they should be doing, not just because the game designer told them to but because it is the thing that they have been trained to do. The internal state of the player (the thing that we are ultimately trying to manipulate) has just as much to do with their memories of past events as with the stimulus that you are presenting them with.
@nintendoeats: Conditioning people is definately a thing, I think it just fits more into like-- using the jump pads n light bridges to get through really hard puzzles than it does with the ending cutscene.
If you'd said that Valve uses conditioning in Portal 2 to give people the tricks they need to get to secret areas, like this one, then yeah I'd agree with that. But in the ending cutscene, R2 is the only button you can press.
@I_smell: It may be the only button that you can press, but isn't the ending way better when you only have to press it once with a very specific plan in mind that you desperately cobbled together in about half a second? I'm sure some people fired it randomly around, and the experience was probably worse for them.
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