I've been thinking about a new series where I talk about the interesting ways in which life and video games do and don't overlap.

The "genesis" of the idea came to me as I've been applying for jobs in NYC. If any of you have spent months applying and being rejected for jobs, like I have, you'll know how infuriating a process it can be. There are no standards for how to apply to jobs. Every. Single. Company. has its own weird quirks, its own set of qualities it is looking for, and *all* of them are completely opaque. And to put this into perspective, I've been a manager at a number of companies and have hired and fired a lot of people, so I know what it's like from the inside as well. So, for some companies, you need a cover letter (despite cover letters being by far one of the most useless pieces of shit on the planet for hiring) and a resume. Some resumes have to meet a certain set of requirements. For example, Oracle ships their applications overseas and has a bunch of poorly paid people scan them and check boxes for certain requirements. Other times, resumes have to include or not include certain kinds of information. For example, my restaurant management experience means next to nothing for many companies, but for Oracle it counted as extra years of experience.

To top all of this off, when you are rejected, almost no company gives you a real reason, and there is almost never any feedback about why you didn't get the job. When there *is* feedback, it's usually a lie, useless or trivially true, such as "we've decided to go in a different direction". Oh really? A different direction than hiring me? No shit? Or, after innumerable interviews, you get the "we want someone with more experience". But, you *knew* how much experience I had!? I told you up front! (that one was a lie).

So, while mulling this all over, I wondered what would happen if a system in a video game worked this way: the objectives for a quest are opaque, even if you know what the objective is, completion of the task will vary in its requirements based on RNG, when you fail to complete the task, you will be provided with an insufficient amount of information to complete it properly the next time, or, the feedback you receive might not even be applicable and, finally, if you ever do complete the objective, you won't know exactly why or how.

So, maybe I'm just describing a Souls game, but that is basically what applying for jobs in the real world is like translated into a video game. This made me think that there are probably a *lot* of examples of crazy, inefficient, weird things that happen in the world, that, if they happened in a video game, would make people very frustrated. And, I think it would be interesting to point those things out, and explore why they are frustrating in games, but are normal in real life.

I think I'm a pretty great person to play DOTA with. Usually, I'm not too serious, but if I am, I'll just stay quiet and focus. I don't flame people. When I'm playing for fun, I'll sometimes joke around, usually by expressing my love for my teammates in goofy ways. And, if someone is flaming me, I'll explicitly target them with my love, such as "hey thedragonisreal420, whenever you call me a noob, I get a double love rune in my heart".

But, recently, I had some issues with my PC, and I ended up in low priority for the first time ever. On top of that humiliation, after 800 games, my abandonment rate went up to 1%. I was mortified.

It all started when I went into a game as PL and my internet acted up. My ping spiked to 1000 and the game was unplayable. I restarted, tried to get things working, but by the time I figured it out, I had already abandoned. Next game was another PL, and this time my computer just freaked out. It started telling me I was using too much memory and crashed, twice. This time I couldn't even figure out the issue, and just restarted my computer. However, at this point, I was in low priority.

No big deal, just two games and I'm back into the land of the living. Except, my beast of a computer decided to short out *again* as I started my first low priority game as Sniper. This is where it went very wrong. I didn't know this until now, but if you abandon a low priority game, you get 3 extra games tacked onto your sentence. So, now, despite not flaming people or intentionally leaving anyone in the lurch, I was 4 in the hole. Woohoo.

If you haven't played low priority before, it works like this. Games take ~5 minutes to join (about twice as long), and you can *only* play All Random (thankfully, you also gain random gold). As you play low priority, Valve has gone to *pains* to let you know. Your game joining timer is red, on your player profile it tells you how many more LP games you have to play, and once you get a random hero selected and join the game, there's a pop up that explains what low priority is and why you're there. Additionally, if anyone leaves low priority, DOTA will remind you that the match *only* counts as a played LP match if you stay, and there are other people who stay. Which... incentivizes you to play 45 minutes of a horrible, horrible game (going AFK adds to your sentence).

I had three distinct experiences in LP. First, the I don't give a shit, let me out of this queue, experience. This is when at least half the enemy team auto feeds into the mid towers. Apparently, even if you auto-feed, you can use the game against your LP penalty. Unfortunately, I ended up hard support, with a try hard Clinkz and an orchid trailing me around the map. So, 45 minutes later, I have 9 deaths, but we win.

Next up was the talkative bunch. I suspect they were thrown into LP because people were fed up with talking 100% of the time, but surprisingly, they were a fun bunch. A guy from Quebec, one (very, very high) dude from Phoenix and a lot of talk about Canada (I happen to be Canadian, so I enjoyed it). I could hear Phoenix420 doing bong hits while he played, but whatever man, live and let live. We won that game too, though I'm surprised those guys could concentrate on playing as they talked about Canadian geography.

The last experience was what I sort of expected from LP. One guy was adamant he wasn't LP, while he screamed at me for being a "jew" because I accidently grabbed the courier from him (I have it hotkeyed, so sometimes I'm not watching where it is). I apologized, but then insisted that I was in love with him, because, you know, he was screaming a lot. The rest of my team was not quite as unpleasant, but close.

I ended playing Earthshaker 3 times, Disruptor once and Legion once. I still find ES really hard as a support, but I did end up killing it in one team fight by chain stunning the cores while my team cleaned up. Otherwise, I was a mess. I've played Disruptor once before, but I ended up creating a lot of space and my cores farmed a bunch. With Legion, I was versus a fed PA and Lycan, so I went Armlet, Blink, MKB, Blademail, AC and Heart. LC is a pretty good PA counter so long as you have your team to back you up. The Blademail was key, and I would probably grab that before MKB if I wasn't doing so well.

I'm now free of the LP shackles and had a stellar PL performance to win my first ranked game back.

I'm playing Dark Souls I.

I had to go to Blighttown. I didn't want to go to Blighttown. The name is shitty sounding, and everything I'd read made it seem like Blighttown is a shitty place to be. But I, reluctantly, began my journey to Blighttown anyway. It took me ten minutes to get to Blighttown, which is accessed through the Depths. Well, technically, there is a shortcut, but I didn't chose the master key at the beginning of the game, so no shortcut for me. Anyway, I fought through all the respawned enemies, and made my way to the bonfire in the Depths, saved, then forged ahead. Once I got to Blighttown, I was almost immediately infected by "toxic", which is different than poison (though it shares the same resist stat), but begins to kill me just as quickly. I have a special kind of moss which cures me, great, but I only have one of these mosses. That doesn't seem too good. As it turns out, I get infected by toxic again, after being ambushed by imp things. This time, I don't have a cure. I begin to run back to the Depths bonfire, but I'm not fast enough and I run out of healing. I die. I respawn in the Depths and begin to run back to Blighttown. Sure enough, I forget the placement of one of the pitfalls that leads into a maze filled with frog-things that can curse you. So, I am surrounded by frogs and, despite my best efforts, I quickly become petrified and die. Oh, and it so happens that I lose 20K souls and 4 humanity in the process. If this wasn't bad enough, when I respawn, I'm "cursed", which means half my health is gone until I can cure myself. But, I don't have the item that cures "curse". So, I read up on curse, and decide that I'm going to trade items with Snuggly the (invisible) Crow to get my curse cure, mostly because I have no souls to buy the cure at this point. I go through the arcane process of dropping an orb in the wrong nest, then the right one, then quitting my game and reloading.

Now I'm back at full health, minus 20K souls and 4 humanity, and all the way back at the beginning of the game.

I like this story. It's tragic, fucked up and exhausting. But I don't know if I liked living the story. I can't tell.

An eerily reminiscent story is how I ended up quitting Demon's Souls and never playing it again. But, I already have a strategy in place to conquer Blighttown, so perhaps I've got the Souls bug, just like everyone else.

As a Canadian living in Brooklyn, it never ceases to amaze me how frantic the Northeast coast of the US becomes whenever there is the slightest suggestion that there might be weather. The kind of panic I'm talking about is exemplified fantastically as "Winter Storm Juno" (otherwise known in Canada as "a bunch of snow", a "blizzard" or, if that doesn't seem epic enough, a "whiteout") descends on the city. Yesterday, knowing that we were going to get the first serious snowfall of the year, and not caring very much about all the hullabaloo, I innocently went to my local grocery store to grab some bread. I was shocked to find people lined up around the entire inside perimeter (I would guess about 100, maybe more) waiting to purchase groceries. For the life of me, I don't understand this reaction to a blizzard. It's as if people (not all obviously, but many) will take any excuse their given to pretend it's the apocalypse. I just hope that these people are normally really intense preppers, and that this sickness hasn't infected the general population. But I think it has. I was reading reports of grocery stores all around the city sold out of food. And the blizzard is expected to last, wait for it, *two days*. Do people really not have two days worth of food in their homes?

Besides that, I'm also fascinated with America's unrelenting need to brand everything, and in doing so, blow it immensely out of proportion. Even weather reports are now PR spin and marketing. I don't think I've experienced a storm in NYC that hasn't been named, weather it's "Winter Storm Juno" or an "Arctic Vortex" or a "Nor'easter". I can reliably get a huge laugh out of my Canadian friends when I tell them about how New Yorkers freak out about the "Arctic Vortex", and then explain that it resulted in temperatures of about -5C (~23F) and everyone was afraid to go outside.

Not only that, but the city preemptively has started shutting down municipal services. When I was living in Canada, the only way you'd get a snow day is if the bus literally could not make it to your house, and you'd only find out about school being cancelled by listening to the radio at 7AM the day of. To cancel school, or close the parks, *in advance* was unheard of. But here in NYC, they're calling for emergency vehicles to stay off the roads, they're closing the parks, shutting down transit, NYU is shutting down. I guess if the people of NYC want an apocalypse, the mayor's office is doing its best to mimic the situation.

What ends up happening then is a self-fulfilling prophecy: because everyone is so scared and everything is already shut down, no matter how middling the weather, it feels as though the city is under attack. No one goes anywhere, and everyone is stocked up on bottled water and MREs.

If anyone can explain why there's such a discrepancy between how weather is handled in Canada, literally 5 kms from the US border (I could see the US from my house when I was on the roof) and about 80 kms from BUffalo, and how it's handled in NYC, it would be much appreciated. Meanwhile, I'm going to go build some barricades and clean my shotgun.

** Apologies in advance if Juno ends up being a disaster. But frankly, given all the bullshit about weather that I hear when I'm in NYC, it's hard to take any of this stuff seriously.

I wanted to put this out in the open, but in a controlled environment, because there isn't much space to do that when it involves GG.

I've read a lot of articles about GG supporters, and almost everyone uses language like "losers", "geeks", "nerds" etc. to describe them. I don't know about y'all, but the only thing I know about GG supporters is that they seem to play a bunch of games. Other than that, and other than some celebrities (Adam Baldwin), Wikileaks(?) and a minority of others posting on their personal Twitter accounts, I know basically nothing about who GG supporters are, because most of them are posting anonymously.

Are most GG supporters gamers? It's likely. Are the GG vanguard (those making the most fuss) gamers? I couldn't say.

We know at this point, with provocative articles like this, that "gamers" is an incredibly loose term these days, one which might not actually mean anything (like "TV watchers"). So if all we know about GG supporters is that they're gamers, then what do we actually know about them? I'm going to say we don't know a hell of a lot.

Furthermore, we don't even know how many of them there are. For all the ruckus this is creating, I wonder if it couldn't be a few thousand people just stirring things up. Who knows?

That's part of the problem with some of the media coverage. In many cases, the press is making the situation sound like there's going to be a 100K person march in Manhattan of pro-GG "geeks", but I really don't see any evidence of that either way. This all kind of feels like the same trap that journos get into when they write about Anonymous or 4chan, as if those are coherent, homogenous groups of people. I suppose this always happens. Once, we called people "Communists" full-stop, despite strong divides within that community between Leninists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists etc.

Anyone know anything about the demographics of GG supporters and/or their numbers?

UNFINISHED*

* This is unfinished, but since I wrote it on the actual site, I have to publish it to save it. Oh well.

RNG Gods and Us #1

One of my pet peeves in game design discussion is people talking about random number generators (RNGs). Given how widespread the application of the concept is to gaming, it's as if no one actually knows what random means. Random literally means without principle. But, this isn't at all how most game mechanics that are allegedly decided by the "RNG gods" operate. Typically, an RNG-type situation is governed by a set of principles that constrain the possible outputs. For example, in Diablo, I can't roll a weapon that has 1 million base damage, no matter what level I am, because the designers didn't balance these sorts of weapon values, and so put a cap on the highest amount of base damage that any weapon can attain.

This is just one example, but there are a lot more. Suffice it to say, I just think calling this stuff "random" obscures what's actually going on. And what's actually going on is much more interesting than anything the RNG gods could muster.

So, because I have a weird fixation on this issue, I may write about RNG-type stuff a lot, which is why I numbered this particular post.

Randomness and Predictability

I stumbled onto this article by Keith Burgun on Gamasutra, and I thought it was really interesting. Most articles about gaming don't really include arguments, and so I was pretty impressed with how thorough this ended up being, especially the list of counter-arguments at the end.

Basically, the point of the article is to say that randomness (or "mechanical unpredictability", which just means the game uses something akin to a dice roll, within specified parameters, in their design) in strategy game design artificially creates complexity, but is actually a cover for much simpler mechanics. You should read the whole article if you're interested in why the author believes this, but I think he makes a pretty compelling case. Now, I don't know if that means we should strip away randomness from strategy games. The author thinks there is a strong case to be made that we can create interesting, complex strategy games without randomness, but he doesn't argue for it in the piece (that would take a lot more work). That might very well be true, but I couldn't say given the level of information I have.

What I did find interesting was how, despite the author wanting strategy games to not have randomized elements, he still wants them to be unpredictable. Now, I asked him whether he thinks strategy games should be in principle predictable, but I wasn't completely satisfied with his answer. But, since I asked over Twitter, it was pretty difficult to ask follow up questions without it devolving into a mess of multi-part tweets. So, here is a little discussion about that.

If a game state (which is just any instance of a game. Chess is an easy example. Any particular configuration of the board is a "game state". But these also exist in real-time games, it's just harder to think about because sometimes you're being shot at.) was in principle predictable, that would just mean that, with perfect knowledge, you could always predict what would happen. I can't actually figure out a good example of a game that's like this, which is why I asked Keith whether he wants strategy games to be this way, because if he does, it seems really odd to me. (I actually think what Keith might want is that all strategy games be in principle winnable, which is also weird, because I think that's actually the same thing as in principle predictable.) Anyway, the point is that the author has set up this argument where he says that randomness creates the facade of complexity, but is actually a cover for weak game mechanics. Why? Well, as he says, because many failed game-states aren't a product of your choices, but randomness, so that means it takes a lot longer to actually get the game-state you want (and therefore, means you play more). But if there *wasn't* randomness at play, then the game would be boring, because you'd easily be able to manufacture the game-states you wanted.

The problem is that it's not clear what the difference is between unpredictability and randomness for the player. If you're playing chess, at some point in the game, even with perfect knowledge, you can't 100% predict your opponent's move. Computers can generate probability tables, but they can't know for sure. The issue is that the unpredictable nature of my opponent's next chess move looks very similar to constrained, mechanical unpredictability, which is what games impose.

Introducing "Dismantle Design"

Talk to my girlfriend, and she'll be able to relate hundreds of occasions where her eyes glaze over with boredom as I drone on about one or another game mechanic. And despite being a gamer herself, our relationship at least partially depends on us not getting into these prolonged conversations (read: long, one-sided rants) about games.

Needing an outlet for all of my pent up game analysis, I've decided to start this little series on game design and mechanics. The focus of this series will be on analyzing various design decisions in a way that's more in depth than, say, a review, but less in-depth than what you might get from an actual developer. It's not that this series will be difficult to understand, but it will likely require that you've played games for a good portion of your life, and you find concepts like "balance" interesting. This is not going to be a series where I rant about how OP some hero is in DOTA. If you want that, you'll just head to the forums.

No, this series will be me grappling with design elements in games and trying to understand why they exist and what problems they create or solve. What's interesting to me about this series, and why I wanted to start writing it, is that I don't have any formal design background, and I'm not aware of how different design decisions affect game performance. Because of this lack of knowledge, this really is a series of unfettered exploration and, at times, wild conjecture. Since you all probably listen to the Bombcast, I'm assuming this is something you enjoy.

Time and Space: The Long Dark

The Long Dark (TLD) is a survivalist "simulation" game from Canadian developers Hinterland Studios, currently available as an early access alpha game. In this version, Hinterland has only opened up their survival sandbox mode, which simply tasks the player with surviving as long as possible in the unforgiving Canadian wilderness during the winter.

What sets TLD's survival mechanics apart from many of its predecessors is an almost obsessive focus on meters and stats. While many survivalist games will have a hunger mechanic, TLD actually has a calorie meter, and foods with various caloric values. TLD also includes thirst, fatigue, injury, disease and exposure (coldness). Varying weather conditions (storms, whiteouts, fog) will make you more prone to exposure; food items have a condition percentage which determines weather you'll contract food poisoning; water must be treated to ensure drinkability and so on. The point is, there are a lot of mechanics at work here, all of which, to my knowledge, are under scrutiny by the devs and being tweaked regularly.

I have some issues with the implementation of the various systems, mostly to do with Hinterland claiming that the game is supposed to be a "simulation", but that's not really what I'm finding myself most interested in. What's interesting to me about TLD is how it handles time and space. Eventually, I'll argue that since the map in TLD is small, this forces designers to increase the speed of the in-game time, but since many aspects of the game are not affected by this increase in speed, it forces the player to play what should be a methodical game, frantically.

Like most games that include clock time (as opposed to, say, a "timer" like in Mario. You might also think of "clock time" as a day/night cycle) as a gameplay feature, TLD speeds time up. If I had to guess, I'd say that a day in-game is approximately an hour in real-world time. So, why do designers do this? I know it's an obvious question, but it's worth talking about for some context. Well, one reason is that gamers are impatient, and games that are real-time will either be boring (since there won't be a lot to do) or they'll seem "unrealistic" (you'll accomplish a superhuman amount of tasks in too short a time). Additionally, if the day/night cycle determines various gameplay mechanics, you don't want it to take 8 hours of game-time for the player to see this content. Another reason, and one that I think is most relevant to TLD, is an issue of space. If the in-game time is real-time, and time plays an integral role in your design, then your game world has to accommodate this by being very large. Why? Well, otherwise the game will be too easy, because your character will be able to too quickly collect resources and explore.

Speeding up the in-game time creates some specific issues for survivalist games, especially ones that focus, like TLD does, on "simulation": the faster the in-game time, the faster your stats decrease and the faster you die. As a survivalist game designer, the task is to balance in-game time speed, stat degradation and resource gathering with an eye towards fun and realism. The problem is these two goals are frequently at odds with each other. But, there's another problem that I think is interesting for TLD: because Hinterland has chosen to handcraft static maps, the size of those maps are going to constrain the designer's ability to tweak these three mechanics. Why? Well, the size of the map at least partially accounts for the speed of the player's resource accrual. The smaller the map, the easier it is to find resources (food, shelter etc.), and the easier the game will be. In order to make the game feel realistic (that is, more difficult), a small map will force a designer to increase the in-game time so that resource accrual and stat degradation are more in-sync.

That might be a lot to digest, but here's where we are. TLD doesn't use procedurally generated maps like many of its survivalist peers, as a result their maps are smaller, since the cost of larger handcrafted maps is prohibitive (this is conjecture, but it makes sense to me). However, small maps make resource allocation easier, which in-turn means that in-game time must be sped up. Since Hinterland is trying to make TLD somewhat realistic, time and stat degradation are usually going to be linked in unchangeable ways (it takes 3 days to die from thirst, weeks for hunger etc.).

Now, the problem is that many in-game actions are not subject to clock time. For example, walking around a room, shooting a gun, picking up an item or almost any animation. If these actions were, it would make the game feel really weird. Imagine aiming and firing a gun at 24 times normal speed. It would probably feel like you'd hacked the game. Another important aspect that is unaffected by in-game time is the player's decision making. And TLD is nothing if not a game of weighing options and making decisions: should I run and risk being too tired to find wood or walk and risk dying of exposure? These choices are what makes the game interesting. The problem with TLD right now is, since resource accrual is somewhat easy, the in-game time feels really fast. And it feels so fast, that a game that should be a bit boring, feels really frantic. Instead of exploring the world, it feels necessary to search everything as fast as possible, and make split-second decisions without weighing all of your various options. In short, the actions that are not affected by the in-game time feel like they have to be done very quickly to make up for the fact that, well, you're dying really fast. Oddly, in speeding up the in-game time, TLD makes tasks that are unaffected by in-game time feel hopelessly slow.

This problem manifests in different ways, such as having to eat constantly or dying of thirst in your sleep. But, I think the most problematic element is pushing the difficulty curb up artificially by increasing the speed of the in-game time, and forcing players to compensate by memorizing locations and rushing through many elements of the game.

I don't know what the answer to this problem is for Hinterland. It might be that they need larger maps so they can slowdown the in-game time, but if they have larger maps, will the game become boring as the distances increase? Do they change the relationship between the various stats and time? How does that affect realism? Should Hinterland be so obsessed with realism? What is the value of it to a game if it means sacrificing fun?

My issue is that, right now, TLD is missing the mark on what it means to create a survivalist "simulation" game. Survivalism is about speed, yes, but it's also about planning and decision-making. It's not (exclusively) about running around frantically living hand to mouth, but about the slow accrual of resources that results in, if not comfort, at least a certain level of stability. It feels as though, right now, TLD is creating a (somewhat frantic) version of the early stages of survivalism, where you survive how you can because you're dying and stranded. But eventually that should transition into something more interesting and stable.

I have a confession: I haven't played P.T. I did watch Patrick's Quick Look (and I did have a real-life cockroach crawl up my leg during it) though, and I think that I've seen all I need to see to make the argument I'm going to make. But, there's always the chance that, having not played the game myself, I'm missing something. I really do hope I'm missing something, because P.T. has made me pissed off about its fan's inability to see it for what it is (remember: Patrick called it "brilliant"): a really confusing, shit puzzle game.

Some of you may have played the infrequently excellent Silent Hill: Shattered Memories by Climax Studios (a game I did actually play through myself), a Wii almost-exclusive that had to be ported over to the PS2 to break even. That game, despite its flaws, was legitimately innovative. It tracked what the player did throughout the game, and the ending you received was based on your interactions with the game world. Spend too much time in the bar? Well, turns out you were an alcoholic and fucked up your kid. The endings weren't always the happiest, but they yearned to show the player that the game is watching you; it knows what you're doing. This kind of message worked beautifully in the Silent Hill universe, because Silent Hill is supposed to be the player character's own nightmare. What better way to fuck with this narrative trope than by making elements of it your nightmare too?

At the end of the day, the implementation of reactive gaming in Shattered Memories was pretty weak. Though there were elements in the actual game world that changed based on what you did, and the ending was dependent on your actions, it felt like a skin and bones effort. I honestly don't know if I would have realized what the game was doing if it hadn't been mentioned at preview events. The best way to put it is, though the world was, in some trivial way, reacting to what I was doing, I never felt like the game was watching me; it was never a presence in my gaming experience.

So, what the hell do I even want then? Well, maybe I'm asking for too much. Maybe all I'm going to get from a new horror game is what Shattered Memories already did: fill out a database of the shit I picked up or looked at and slightly alter my gaming experience accordingly. If that's the case, I'll be sad, but I won't be angry. So, what is so terrible about P.T. that is making me angry?

I was lying in bed, thinking of P.T. and how Patrick constantly didn't know what to do, and wondered "why is the game designed like that"? You could tell that Patrick was pulled out of the experience every time he had to think about triggering the world in a particular way so that he could progress to another sequence of the game. My problem is that, the game is built like a fucking game, like a game that could've been made 10 years ago. I could see, and I think Patrick could see, how fake it all really was.

In P.T. you spend inordinate amounts of time trying to figure out what the developers want you to do, as if you're solving some obtuse puzzle that barely follows any rules, and gives you scraps for clues, all the while glaringly pointing out the simple, simple gears that is making itself tick. Honestly, think back to the fast walking sequence, where Patrick accidentally doesn't look through the gross bathroom peep hole for long enough. First of all, how is he supposed to know how long that scene is? Second, why the fuck does he have to watch exactly the entire scene before the game realizes it's time to move on?! Oh, I know why, because, video games. Because for as long as I can remember, designers have taken the easy way out and just created triggers in the world and made the player find where these are: make the player respond to them. Unfortunately, this can work for a game like Little Big Planet, and it worked for the original Resident Evil, and even Resident Evil 4, but this kind of game design has worn out its welcome (despite the cries from some corners pf the internet about "curated" or "hand-crafted" experiences. For the record, I think a game world can be both reactive and hand-crafted). This kind of game design hubris, where designers think that players should be reactive to what they've created instead of the other way around, is what's got me so mad.

What we should all be asking for is a game that feels seamless. A game where you don't have to trigger some cutscene by running in a circle five times and then clicking on a phone after the 3rd ring (or after some bells chime), but where, no matter what you do, something is going to happen. I want the game to watch how I'm playing, and if I take an interest in the radio in the first 5 minutes, I want that to be important and I want that to trigger some event. If I try to go into the bathroom, I don't want the cutscene to only play out when it's convenient for Kojima, I want it to play out regardless of how long I've been playing or what else I've accomplished. And there's precedent. Left 4 Dead has an AI Director that changes the experience every time you play, and it's mostly seamless. At no point are you worried about triggering the next horde, or making sure you've completely a bunch of steps before you can move on to the next area. All you care about is survival, and the game is trying to make that extremely difficult for you.

The reason I'm angry is because P.T. suggests that Silent Hills is going to be more of this same "if...then" drudgery. And it also suggests that Hideo Kojima, who people put on a pedestal for his ability to combine games and story, is a dinosaur who is helping to hold the game industry back. In a time where No Man's Sky exists, a procedurally generated monolith of a universe, and Day Z exists, hell, where Minecraft exists, how is it that our most beloved franchises are being helmed by guys with such antiquated sensibilities?

Edit: A lot of awesome, and sometimes exasperated(?), conversation has been happening on this post. A bunch of people pointed out, rightfully, that P.T. is not, as it said at the end, directly related to Silent Hills. I've changed my view after a lot of back and forth about this. My latest post on page 3 has a decent summary. Basically, please don't just read this and respond. There's a lot more that's happened since it went up.

Removing this until edits are done.