My good buddy Avery said that he would gladly watch a stream of me playing Amnesia, and encouraged me to record myself for that reason. After the gang and I all made fun of him, 'cause none of us really partake of the whole streaming thing, I figured why the hell not, and downloaded the required software. Since no one else is going to watch the show (well, no one's going to watch it, not even Avery has...), I called it "Just for Avery", and you can now watch me play on YouTube.

Behold, Part 1, in which I refuse to shut the fuck up while staring at corners like it's the end of the Blair Witch Project.

In Part 2, I inaudibly take forever to solve simple puzzles.

In Part 3, I make up for my general incompetence with rampant cheating.

In Part 4, my dreams of a voice acting career are soundly destroyed.

Suddenly, the animator had a fatal heart attack. I mean, I fucked up the recording software and recorded an hour of audio with no video. So, because the checkpoint system wouldn't let me reload and re-play the ending, I started the whole motherfucker over.

In Part –1, I start the game over. The good news is, there's a lot less figuring out what to do. The bad news is, unburdened by the need to figure out what to do, I'm even more garrulous than usual.

In Part 0, I get caught up with my original recordings, and discuss the parts of Amnesia that I think could have been better, because, obviously, I know better than the actual game designers.

Then I cheated a bunch to skip over the middle part, and jump straight to the ending again, where after losing the footage three times over again, I finally completed Amnesia in Part 5!

Minecraft is actually a really messy game. I think I would rate it much more poorly if there were anything else worthwhile in the same gameplay genre – as it stands, the other available games are messier still (titles like Dwarf Fortress and The Forest).

Which would you rank better, BioShock Infinite, or Bastion? They’re both linear, story-focused combat games with customization elements. I tend to prefer shooters, and BSI has twice the content and an assload more size and grandeur, plus it’s story has all manner of science-fictioney fun. But Bastion, I would argue, has a vastly superior customization system, and a much more solid, cohesive story that is much better integrated with the gameplay. I don’t really think either one had obviously better combat mechanics, which is pretty much the meat of both titles, so that’s a legitimately tough call.

Imagine how much more awesome Magicka would be if it were structured like Left 4 Dead. It’s biggest problem, by far, is the fact that it’s such a pointless slog to play through any of those levels a second time. If they were more interchangeable in terms of their ordering, and had some of L4D’s dynamic enemy spawns and a similar Director AI to calibrate difficulty, I think Magicka could have really risen above it’s limited means.

Does Gone Home’s purity as a story-game make it better than games like BioShock that switch between story/exploration play and gunplay? Or is BioShock just Gone Home plus guns, and therefore “better” because “more”?

Cogs is a really hard game to evaluate. It’s so good. It’s really friggin’ good. But it’s just slider puzzles! How do you rank that against some shit like Brink, which is a way more elaborate, complex kind of game, but sucks so bad at everything it’s trying to do? Same goes for all these little indie puzzle platformers. Braid? Limbo? Thomas Was Alone? Trine? Yeah, they’re all great, but, it’s just platforming. I don’t even LIKE platforming.

GamerGate consumes more of my time, lately, than PLAYING GAMES does, and I find that notion almost as offensive as the movement itself. All I want is to enjoy my games in peace. But I can’t, because GamerGate insists on butting in. It’s spread across the sites I frequent, it harasses the developers making the games I love, and it’s trying to silence the critics and analysts that I trust.

I’d rather be playing games.

I want to enjoy my games. I want my games to be good. I want my games to be fun and sad and hilarious and scary. I want my games to be dark and edgy and violent and bloody. I want my games to be innovative and thoughtful and meaningful and beautiful. I want games to be sexy and racy and hot and explicit. I want games to be tense and touching and heartwarming and heartbreaking.

I want games to grow as a medium. I want independent development to get bigger and easier. I want the industry and get stronger and better and appeal to larger audiences. I want games to bring in new people and new ideas and always keep moving forward.

I want games that give me something I’ve never experienced before. That let me experience things I could never get from my life. Things I can’t get from film or text or music or sculpture. I want to know what it’s like to be someone I’m not, to deal with things that I don’t.

Nothing GamerGate does ever seems to line up with what I want. GamerGate harasses and shouts and distracts from games, distracts from the making of games and the analysis of games. They attack independents making unique games; attack critics voicing dissenting opinion. Whatever their professed goals, all I see them enact is hatred, bigotry, and ignorance – and a constant drive for the status quo. For repetition, homogeneity, exclusion and stagnation.

GamerGate won’t get out of my life. It won’t stop threatening and attacking my hobby. It won’t just fuck off, leave games alone, and let me enjoy them – because, of course, it was there first. Not GamerGate, mind you, but hatred; sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, and harassment.

It’s the status quo in games, in culture, in society, and in my life in general. And it’s poison. Stalling progress, creating losses and opportunity costs for every living person, and corrupting any pathetic pretense to morality that ever might have been.

My beloved has taken a year-long trip overseas to study at Oxford, and I’m attempting to ease the transition with a little extra distraction for the first month by participating in Patrick Klepek's “Shocktober” month-long horror movie marathon. Accordingly, I’ve prepared a list of 31 horror films – old and new, classics and crap – to watch. Theoretically, that’d be one per night, but given that one per night is a practical impossibility, it’ll more likely be rather sporadic. Odds are, even, that I won’t get through all 31, but whatever, it’s not a friggin’ contest.

Anyway. Most of my films are taken from the suggestions provided by Patrick, with a number of modifications, mostly in the interest of replacing especially shit films with ones I’ve been meaning to watch (mostly adpatations of HP Lovecraft stories, because I’ve been on a big HPL kick), or replacing sequels with originals in cases where I’m not up to speed with whatever series. ANYWAY anyway, here’s the list.

1. Alien
2. The ABC’s of Death Funny Games Trick ‘r Treat
3. Funny Games The ABCs of Death Funny Games
4. The Guest (In Theatre) Honeymoon
5. Coherence
6. Honeymoon The Signal
7. The Signal The Guest (In Theatre) Pandorum
8. Grabbers
9. Death Spa
10. The Houses October Built (In Theatre)
11. Dead Snow
12. Trick ‘r Treat The ABCs of Death
13. Kill List
14. The Resurrected
15. Halloween
16. Cthulhu
17. The Loved Ones
18. The Banshee Chapter
19. Possession
20. The Haunted Palace
21. The Battery
22. V/H/S
23. V/H/S/2
24. Escape From Tomorrow
25. Exists
26. The Whisperer in Darkness
27. The Entity
28. The Borderlands
29. The Babadook
30. Eraserhead
31. Horns (In Theatre)

So, if you want to join in, then assemble a list! You could use mine, of course, or Patrick's, or make your own, which is probably most advisable. I'll be posting reviews of each film as I watch them on Tumblr and my personal blog, too. My apologies for all of the edits – I keep running into technical or timing difficulties!

Frictional Games: The last name “Grip” is strangely apt for a horror game designer.

I recently wrapped up Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and, like many, I have almost exclusively good things to say about it. The atmosphere of Amnesia is pretty much perfect, and while the pacing of the game effectively switches gears from moments of calmer investigation or puzzle solving to moments of excitement and tension, it goes great lengths to avoid letting the player ever feel completely secure. I thought, however, that to keep an Amnesia review interesting, it would be educational to examine the places where the game actually failed for me, and analyze what went wrong. Spoilers abound, but are predominantly relegated to the last paragraph.

You may find it surprising that I think the seemingly hokey, disembodied-hand-based physics engine was actually under-used. I found it quite intuitive, and I can’t conceive of a better way to simulate the flailing dexterity of a panicked person trying to operate a door handle, or pile up a makeshift barricade. The real disappointments were the occasions when it was unclear whether a given puzzle required an abstract solution (like combining and using inventory objects or finding a switch) as opposed to a physics solution (like throwing a rock). If I had it my way, it would have been all physics manipulation all the time, so as to maintain consistency and immersion.

When I first encountered the game’s monsters, I discovered that they would eventually disappear altogether if I merely waited long enough in a secure location, causing me to adopt a boring, tension-dissolving strategy of sitting around in the dark twiddling my thumbs that was in no way discouraged by the game. I discovered that, in later sections, certain monsters never de-spawn – a breach in the apparent “rules” of the game that resulted in me waiting in a side room for 20 minutes straight and wondering whether the monster music had simply bugged out. The permanent monster, aside from shattering my immersion, also totally undermined my “wait it out” strategy, causing me to wonder: Why did the designers choose not to make EVERY monster permanent?

Most of Amnesia’s plot is, predictably, made up of antecedent action, delivered through notes, flashbacks, and monologues with middling to good effectiveness (taking a few cues from Gone Home might have improved this somewhat). The most egregious disruption of immersion in the entire game, however, came from a late game “conversation” with Agrippa, who awkwardly pauses while speaking to the player as if to let Daniel reply, then continues talking as though Daniel had said something that he didn’t. Ideally, I would have simply cut Agrippa from the game, since the appearance of a friendly person significantly undermines the ongoing tension, but in lieu of that, perhaps they could at least have suggested that Agrippa was deaf, or the like, to justify him monologuing at a silent Daniel.

Lucas Pope: who would’ve thought Naughty Dog ever employed people with original ideas?

I think the most impressive achievement of Papers, Please is not the fact that it took a mind-numbingly boring task and somehow turned it into a legitimately entertaining, flow-inducing activity – it is the fact that this may be one of the first games I have ever played in which the core mechanical systems of the game and the story were united in such an incredible, effective way. Papers, Please is a triumphant example of the medium used for its highest artistic potential: mechanics as metaphor; gameplay as theme; challenge as message.

Papers, Please is ostensibly about approving valid documents and denying invalid ones at a border checkpoint, but it keeps things loose with regards to the real end goal of the game. You can lose, certainly, if you perform poorly enough at this task, but your proficiency to control how and when you fail also provides you with ethical agency. The game regularly prompts you to compromise your apparent function in favour of decency, trust, or the promise of revolution – it asks you to set your own goal, and to express your values, but it does so entirely through the mechanism of approving or denying passports.

This is what Papers, Please does that other games (usually) do not: it presents the player with meaningful, consequential, expressive choices, but it does so as part of the core gameplay, by altering the contexts and input variables of that gameplay. When a revolutionary insurgent asks to be let through with forged documents, you are still playing the same game as before: your pay stub will suffer for letting that person through, which might cause you to lose the game. Maybe, if you are not watching closely, you will miss the forgery and let that person through accidentally. Maybe you were doing badly beforehand, and you have to deny them just to avoid losing the game. Maybe you deny them on principle, because you do not trust the rebels, or because your job is to screen out forged or flawed documents and you just want to do your job.

When you compare Papers, Please to another game that features the same kind of branching storyline fraught with perilous ethical dilemmas, like, say, Mass Effect, you can see much more clearly the difference in the execution: Mass Effect’s core gameplay is combat action, but the only times the player is presented with serious moral choices are as strict “A, B, or C” events in dialogue trees. These set the context for battles, or happen as a consequence of battles, but the combat mechanics are wholly independent of the storytelling aspect of the game. Mass Effect is a fantastic game, but it keeps its narrative, its themes, and its metaphor in one zone, and its core action in a different one. Papers, Please makes no such compromise – mechanics, challenge, metaphor and story are as one; true ludonarrative resonance.

Game where you are a dice who judges the players based on good/bad deeds that they do throughout the day and lands on the side of justice

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) September 23, 2013

The game I ended up with is a mobile app with two games in one: an asynchronous, turn-based, menu-operated, multiplayer RPG with a major ethics/morality emphasis (lots of Fable-like aesthetic consequences for the player’s actions, plus the player’s actions would unlock or close off future quest lines) and a die-rolling physics simulator that uses the phone's accelerometer motion control. Bear with me, this does make sense eventually.

On the RPG side: the player is presented with a world map, clustered with people in need and dungeons to plumb (plus merchants, skill trainers and whatnot), and they can commit to a quest by selecting one off of the map (à la Kingdom of Loathing). Once engaged in a quest, the player is presented with a succession of multiple-choice scenarios, based on their skills and the context of the situation, not unlike a text adventure. All of the player’s options are substantial choices; there’s less “go north” and more “take the long route, avoiding trouble”; not so much “cast fireball” as “incinerate enemies with impunity”. Every decision has a serious impact on the quest, creating observable consequences, or even taking the player down a completely separate branch of the quest-line.

Every decision also involves some element of chance (how badly do you get hurt while incinerating enemies, how much of your food does taking the long route use up, et cetera), but instead of a random number generator producing those results, we have the second major component of the game: Once a player makes a choice in a quest scenarios, their progress locks, and they are taken to a physics simulation of a twenty-sided die rolling down a ramp (think Rock of Ages), controlled by the mobile device’s motion detection. Whatever number is rolled will be used as the “randomly generated” number for some other player’s quest choice. The roll would not only affect the outcome of that player’s action, but might also be used to generate “random” events to procedurally complicate their quest-line.

Right before performing a roll, the player would be given an anonymous briefing about the recipient character: their current choice and the consequences of the roll; and a set of statistics like altruism/selfishness, cruelty/mercy, and bravery/cowardice of that character based on their history. During the roll, obstacles, power-ups, and modifiers could be hit to affect the die’s momentum and modify the final number, giving the rolling player extra control over the result. Players might earn single-use momentum boosts for the rolling game as rewards for quests, and in the rolling game there might be collectible XP bubbles to pick up, just so that the two components of the game feed into one another more.

Left 4 Dead & Left 4 Dead 2 are among my all-time most favourite video games, thanks to their unique and ingenious design: a series of short, story-driven campaigns featuring relatable, interesting characters and mountains of apocalyptic window dressing; a four-player cooperative multiplayer format with incredible interdependence between players necessitating effective teamwork; endless replayability thanks to careful randomization elements and the “Director” AI tweaking the difficulty of each level to suit the skill of the players; and the general polish of well-paced, varied, shooter combat.

In their wake, I have been on a long quest for more and better cooperative gameplay.

A few games jumped aboard the multiplayer co-op bandwagon with survival and horde modes, but the concept of holding out as long as possible against inevitable death was far from the goal-oriented drive of L4D’s campaigns. A few titles here and there bother to include cooperative campaigns to complement their single-player modes, but these tend to be lengthy and unreplayable, making it difficult to enjoy a quick pick-up game of them. Exempli gratia: I played only once through Portal 2, and only with a single partner for that entire run.

Borderlands had great promise, adding an open world and customizable skills and gear to the formula, but ultimately leant too heavily on its Diablo-esque format: optimizing a character for play can easily take 100+ hours, at which point there aren’t any quests left and the grind has robbed all excitement from the endeavour. I found myself playing for the addiction, rather than the action, while I could have my optimal gear loadout within 30 minutes of starting a new L4D campaign.

Then there was Brink, which didn’t seem to understand that making a competitive multiplayer mode and then replacing the other team with bots isn’t really the same as having a properly designed cooperative mode. The triviality of respawning every 30 seconds robbed me of any sense of character – I wasn’t a named protagonist, I was just one of an endless supply of reinforcements, regardless of how much consequence the game tried to heap upon the results of a match.

When I heard about Payday, it seemed like a sure thing, being as it was more or less identical to L4D. Unfortunately, a lack of polish was crippling: massive, time-consuming character progression, awful pacing and difficulty balance. Payday 2 had promise, since it did a lot better in terms of varying the gameplay, but has recently extended its character progression into the realm of several years of continuous play, and I don’t have the patience.

Planning to try 2012’s Syndicate and the upcoming Destiny set for release in 2014. Still searching, still hopeful.

Game where you must maintain your vacuum shop whilst also harboring criminals at the same time.

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) September 24, 2013

It’s a tycoon game! You need to operate your vacuum shop to the best of your abilities in the classic vein of games like Lemonade Stand, but with a twist: the vacuum shop is just the commercial front for what is actually a mob den. The basics of managing the shop would actually be pretty trivial: each month (or week, whatever works) the gangsters would fund the player an allowance to pay the bills and maintain stock and so forth, and at the end of the month, if the shop fails to turn a profit? No big deal. The heists, protection rackets, and contraband dealings of the mob bring in more than enough.

So while the player would still manage purchasing and pricing stock, advertising their wares, and so forth, only a gross failure on the retail business end of things would end the game: if the shop is being run so poorly that it starts to eat up all of the gang’s actual profits, then it’s become more trouble than it is worth and the gang would have the player whacked. The more important responsibilities for the player would be to facilitate the gang’s activities in and around the shop while maintaining a believable storefront to keep the authorities from discovering their nefarious enterprises.

First and foremost, this would entail spatially furnishing the store to accommodate hidden caches for weapons, drugs, and the mob’s meeting room (which could be un-hidden, as long as it can be rapidly disguised as a mundane rec room, storage basement, or the like). Occasionally, police officers would conduct a search of the premises following simple, predictable AI – something like a tower defence game – so the player’s construction and arrangement of the shop would need to distract and redirect them until they are satisfied of the legitimacy of the storefront. It would also mean keeping the store’s books clean: if the store consistently fails to turn a profit, month after month, tax investigators would step in and attempt to discover the actual source of the shop’s income, perhaps requiring the player to “cook the books” in some manner of puzzle minigame. Finally, the player would need to prepare the store to defend against attacks by rival gangs.

As the game progressed, the player’s goals would revolve around helping the mob expand their operations by expanding the shop, laundering money through purchases and sales of vacuum cleaners, concealing ever-escalating amounts of contraband, fending off increasingly shrewd investigators and interrogators, and increasingly aggressive gang battles. As an eleventh-hour twist, the mob might lose access to a large portion of its funds late in the game and have to run one month’s operations on the legitimate income of the store. And, at the end of a well-played campaign, the player would be rewarded with a lengthy prison sentence courtesy of Jimmy the Snitch.

What if you played as a letter of the alphabet that could jump into speech bubbles to either help people or get them into deep trouble?

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) February 7, 2013

I think that playing as a single letter of the alphabet severely limits the gameplay options and puts an awkward constraint on puzzle creation, so instead, while maintaining the spirit of the idea, I would give the player all 26 letters – but with each letter usable only once. As a scene progresses, the player is given the opportunity to make a single modification to each speech bubble, with the changes they make forcing the story to take a different turn. The player can also opt to simply leave a given speech bubble alone, saving their letters for later.

The biggest challenge would be creating lines of dialogue wherein every line has at least a few opportunities to introduce a meaningful change. For simplicity, the player shouldn't be able to make any change, only pre-programmed ones, but in the interest of fun, the pre-programmed options should encompass every possible, meaningful alteration. "Do you like pie?" might become "dot you like pie?", but the modified sentence is gibberish, so it shouldn't be an option. By contrast, "do you like pies?" is viable, but here we observe a secondary challenge: "Pie" becoming "pies" isn't going to even raise an eyebrow; we need to create sentences that can be changed in substantial ways, ways that alter the flow of the scene. Some possibilities:

• Adding past tense to verbs: "I love you." becomes "I loved you."

• Adding plurality to nouns: "He's got game!" becomes "He's got games!"

• Convert one word into another of the same type: "Go rouse the soldiers." becomes "Go arouse the soldiers."

Ideally, most lines would also have multiple viable modifications: "can't you see the art?" is well-loaded, since "art" can become "cart", "dart", "fart", "part", "tart", or "wart", all of which create significant changes in the meaning and significance of that line. If one can generate enough of these, the only remaining problem is finding the right funny story to string them all together. Making any real narrative would likely create a massive computational difficulty in terms of designing every possible outcome of a scene, and every possible branching plot line that could result, it could be easier to manage if the game were set up as a collection of short skits, with a meta-narrative about the Editor (the player) being directed by management to alter the meaning of the series of transcripts so that the edited versions help push the manager's agenda: "Change this love story so it ends up decrying the evils of deforestation" and so forth. While the long narrative would make for a very interesting story, this idea instead offers more variety and clearer goals to work towards.