Hey Duders,

Here is the latest Deep Look! Deep Looks are largely gameplay and commentary like a Giantbomb quicklook; however, I try to cover games that have been out for a while and I intend to use the videos to highlight moments and mechanics that I found particularly worthy of highlighting and exploring. Also I aim to keep the videos under 20 minutes.

In this Deep Look I examine Psychonauts once again to show off how the game utilizes real world objects and concepts to condense and contextualize gameplay information. The world of Psychonauts is rife with symbolism and intelligent design that both makes the world aesthetically cohesive and teach the play about the world in a quick and effective manner. By conveying so much information through smart naming and symbolism, Psychonauts allows its relatively unintuative gameplay systems to blend together naturally into one compete whole. Piggybacking ya'll, it saves a lot of time and energy!

Interesting episode. Two things that I'm not too sure about:

Calling Jung a philosopher seems a little misguided. I can see where someone would make the connection, but his works make him more a psychiatrist. It might seem like a nit-picky distinction (and it is, I guess), but philosophers and psychiatrists tend to disagree with each other so I'd personally avoid mixing them. That being said, if there's one that do bridge the gap, it is defintely Jung.

I don't think FFXIII was the best exemple to use. Obviously, calling something "Crystal curse" would've been clearer than some crazy JRPG jargon, it is still not as clear as Psychonaut using well known terms. Something like crystal curse says nothing other than there is some type of curse and does not really make a connection with a well known concept.

Anyway, that's my two cents. Understand that I don't point out other parts of the video because I think they're good, interesting and well explained.

@fear_the_booboo: Yeah I misspoke on the Jung part. I go off the dome on these and so I didn't catch my mistake. I think it was because I learned about Jungian archetypes in a literature course so I never really thought of his studies in a purely psychological context.

I agree with the FFXIII point as well. I went with that example because the jargon in that game was so dense compared to most games that I felt it really could have used some piggybacking. My choice wasn't the clearest one though. I think a better example would be the biotic powers in Mass Effect clearly aping the force powers from Star Wars. Rather than creating a whole host of new powers with a new source, Mass Effect kept itself largely constrained by what people can do in Star Wars so that the biotic powers were easily digestible.

Good job with the video, just another reminder that I really need to play Psychonauts one of these days

Awesome stuff once again. From the games I've played of his, Schafer is pretty great at world building in ways that can make generally mundane actions (exploring environments in Grim Fandango or the exploration in Psychonauts for example) really engaging and memorable. I don't find gameplay to be his strong suit, but Psychonauts never lets up its charm because of the way the gameplay is shaped around its themes.

@anuncreativename: you really do

This is a really interesting topic and I feel a lot of ambitious games stumble over how they handle this.

E.g. Massive Chalice - I enjoyed my time with the game despite its balancing issues. But one of the things that irked me was that it never effectively established how the world you were defending worked. It explained to you reasonably well what you needed to do, but unlike most Double Fine games (maybe because it's a Brad Muir game instead of a Schafer game) it doesn't really do much with the world itself, from simple things like geography (they had neat looking environments but they had no context) to the miasma itself that is destoying the world (e.g. why is it called the cadence?)

btw I don't know if you saw the DF Adventure documentary, but I think there was a extended segment in it about how the publishers pressured Schafer to take the Summer Camp aspect out of the game. Precisely because in their opinion Summer Camp was not relatable to Non-American audiences, and thus (although they didn't use the term piggybacking) they wouldn't have that base knowledge to appreciate the references.

@slag: I actually loved Massive Chalice's world, but a lot of that was a result of my family being in the game. I am working on a piece about my experiences with the game and I don't want to step on it too much. I'll just say that that game meant a whole lot to me.

I saw that segment of the DF documentary and I understand where the publishers were coming from. Piggybacking is a tough thing because it is culture sensitive. If you lean too far into a single culture's perspective, then the game becomes even more alienating for foreign audiences. I think the sales of the game might speak to the game's inability to translate to some foreign audiences. I still really appreciate it for its singular focus on an american summer camp setting, but I see how it could be a problem for others. I try to do my part by gifting as many copies of the game as I can and buying a bunch of merch. If the game doesn't appeal to a wide enough set of people, then the people who really love it have to over-spend and be ambassadors.

@jiggajoe14:I think Psychonauts should be studied as a perfect example of how far symbolism and clever writing can carry a game. Without its very cohesive art and world building that game would have been a mess of finicky controls and overly ambitious level design, but the aesthetic pulls it all together.