Factions are the enemy of the character

"Terrible things!"
"Awfulness!"
"And then... a hero!"
"The hero is you, or at least is supposed to be, if you're not bad, but I hope you get my point!"

I'm going to go ahead and say that there are two types of dangerous worlds.  In one type of dangerous world there are bad guys and you will kill them.  Maybe the bad guys are being opposed by good guys and you're breaking a stalemate.  Despite this, it's clear that you're the hero, because you're why the good guys won.  You aren't merely helping people, you're Saving the Day.

In the other time there are two or more factions.  Maybe some are better than others, in the sense that they better fit your own personal code or in the sense that the developers clearly intend for you to think they are the good guys.  Despite this, the plot isn't a clear Good vs. Evil.  Rather, it is a struggle between factions.  They are deadlocked.  Since good always wins, logically this means that the factions are of insufficiently differentiated Goodness or Badness.  They're blue and orange rather than black and white: possibly opposites, but that doesn't make one better than the other.

In the first you may struggle with your own demons, but ultimately you go along the Path of Goodness and Heroism and are Totally Awesome.  Essentially it is about you and your character.  Those demons you struggle with, those are part of the story and they help create complexity and contrast with your eventual Being a Good Hero.  If you prefer, you can flip this over and make everything about Being an Evil Villain, such as if you're playing as a Sith or Austria.  Ultimately, it is about you picking a path and punching anyone who interferes, though not without first being tempted by their ideas and offering to subscribe to their newsletter, before determining that it is filled with lies.

When there are factions, even when one seems a little or a lot better than the other, you're not the hero picking a path, but rather you're just someone signing up for a side.  You may be important to the success of that side, but you're not the hero of the story.  You don't win; the faction wins.  Your struggles are therefore secondary.  At worst, they may just look stupid.  When struggling with evil you expect a struggle.  When picking a faction, any straying just makes you either indecisive or treasonous.  Neither of those are particularly sexy personality flaws.  Those are traits given to annoying side characters and villains, not heroes.

This all leads me to a mystery question: What if there are two (or three) factions, and myself?  I'm thinking of Fallout: New Vegas, which I picked up again recently.  While I'm guessing most Westerners would identify more closely with the NCR than the Caesar's Legion, neither side is unambiguously good or evil.  Mr. House does not strike me as good or evil, but entirely neutral on the concept of morality.  If you pick a faction, what you're doing is picking a faction and supporting it.  You're great and all, but once the faction wins the Big Battle, your story is over.  Maybe that's because it's easier to write an ending slideshow than to rescript the whole world to account for the changes.  Or maybe it's because, despite supposedly being the solitary badass, you're not much of anything without the factions.

Yet there is the fourth option: win.  Not help others win, but win yourself.  Crush your enemies, neutralize challengers, take your land, and declare your independence, backed with the firepower to repel any invaders.  You might take the exact same path the entire way, fight every previous battle just the same way, do every side quest the same way, talk to everyone the same way, and yet at the very end you make a single defining choice to back yourself rather than any faction.  This leads me to wonder if I was wrong at the start of this post.  Maybe the character was always being developed, fighting demons, making decisions, and yet because some join a faction, we ignore their development and focus instead on the faction.

Everything's better with sewers

Sewers are great things.  Rather than all our waste of various disgusting sorts just sitting in the street and carving little paths along the side of the road, it instead goes underground.  From there it is moved away to a treatment plant that turns it into something much less toxic.  The result is less disease and less ugly filth.  They're a hallmark of civilization.

They're also pretty nifty in a lack of civilization too.  They're sometimes deep underground and can make half-decent bomb shelters (this is not war-surviving advice).  They can be somewhat clean, since they're designed to move the waste away, and once civilization falls there won't be much waste anyway.  Since they connect so many places, they're like underground highways, giving shelter and conveyance.  This is handy when the surface is irradiated and filled with hostile creatures and people.  Like in Fallout.

I'd played Fallout: New Vegas for a decent bit of time.  I thought I had it more or less figured out.  You've got some vaults over there, deathclaws over there, and of course Roman Mormons over there.  They get a little more aggressive after the apocalypse.

I was wrong!  I was stupid.  I'd played Oblivion and Skyrim and I knew that those were seemingly endless.  Fallout 3 held endless wonders and horrors.  Yet somehow I thought New Vegas would be a nice little package.  Silly me.

Not only had I missed at least one vault, I'd not discovered that there are sewers!  Glorious sewers!  Sewers filled with giant rats and ghouls!  One does not simply walk into a sewer.  One crouches down and explores every last bit of filth, for who knows what might be down there?  As I lay in bed contemplating the mysteries of the world I realized: there was a locked door and I might have found the key.  Or maybe something totally unrelated.  More mystery!

I'm not as much of a fan of caves.  Caves are messy, irregular places, shaped by chaos.  They're natural, but not edible or green, merely hard rock that has taken a long time to get this way and with the help of the mean creatures that live in caves, is going to keep you from changing it.  Caves are mean and only like water and time, though they'll eat anything else.

I turned back on anonymous commenting

7:47 am on May 2.  Let's see how long before I get spam.

I want even my bad people to be good

If you've not seen American History X, I recommend seeing it rather than reading this post.

I liked the main character of Derek (the neo-Nazi), even before he renounced racism.  He was racist and a murderer, yet he was not a valueless sociopath.  He was a someone trying to be a good person, to do the right thing, but with a distorted view of what the right thing was.  He wasn't just some punk using violence and hatred to fit in.

I have a few examples.  Decide for yourself if this is merely selective perception.  After the murders he makes no attempt to run away from the police or fight back.  Was it because they were white or because he knew he was caught red-footed?  Either way, he was demonstrating that he wasn't purely a violent individual.

When in prison he reprimanded the other neo-Nazis for smoking pot.  I'm not opposed to the practice, nor do I think his explanation that "weed is for niggers" is sound logic, but he had some idea of right and wrong.  Despite it making him stand out and perhaps even being dangerous, he did not hide or hide from his values.

He was still a bad man, a violent, murdering, racist, but he was a high-quality bad man.

I was reminded, though not in quite the same way, with the character of Buck in Far Cry 3.  He bought slaves.  He was violent and worked for an even more violent person.  He manipulated the main character to get what he wanted.

That was all fine by me.  He was a villain and didn't make any effort to pretend otherwise.  I dislike it when people pretend to be something that they are not.  And thus, I hated him in the end.

It's funny to me what sort of behavior I'll let slide as long as someone is the villain.  Rape.  Murder.  Kidnapping.  Torture.  All in the name of some strange interpretation of capitalism (perhaps he's an Objectivist).

Yet at the very end he betrayed his word to the protagonist.  That's not right!  Murder me out of nowhere, fine, but don't make a deal and back out on it.  Hell, string me along and leave no ambiguity about your intention to betray me, but don't do this "I'm just a capitalist making a deal" crap and then redefine the terms at the end.  I never want to think that my problems would be better solved with a lawyer than a gun.

Maybe that's why I liked Vaas.  He was a straightforward insane sociopath.  He never told a lie.  If you felt deceived it was entirely due to your own misunderstanding of the situation.  I appreciate a bit of honesty in a villain.

Jumping Puzzles: High-Inertia Rubber

Have you ever jumped and hit a wall?  What happened?  Did you by chance ricochet away at a random angle, flying through the air as if coated in repulsion gel from Portal 2?  This is how the radio tower jumping puzzles work in Far Cry 3.  You fly over obstacles, and plummet off the other side.  You ever so slightly graze a bit of sheet metal and bounce off, falling to your death.

Even when the towers are not killing me for the slightest straying of my character, they are simply annoying.  You climb up and then look around for the next set of ropes.  It's a challenge of having the patience to stare at the area long enough to see the path.  It tends to be highly repetitive.  Climb.  Look.  Climb.  Look.  Climb.  Look.  Jump, miss, die, respawn at the bottom.

In my earlier post I'd complained about the interaction, particularly in the case of grabbing unwanted weapons.  On the second island that hasn't been an issue.  Maybe everyone is a little fatter and therefore hide their guns when they fall.  But the towers...  I hate the towers so very much.

Does destruction require a past?

Bioshock takes the player back through some areas after they've been attacked by the Vox Populi.  The once-pristine streets of Columbia, so clean that even stray coins are thrown in the trash, are now covered in ashes and corpses.  Is the effect made any greater by taking the player through a second time?

The first viewing gives a contrast.  You can see what it was a few hours or days before (the gameplay is long enough that I wonder if we ever sleep) and what it is now.  The upright trash can is knocked over.  The sign that you read before in burned.  Yet I don't think it does much.  The first time through an area is brief and prone to distractions such as bullets and explosions.  Players aren't likely to have much familiarity, let alone nostalgia: "And that's where I shot my first cop!"  We're not going to run through thinking about how different it looks now.  The destruction is self-evident.  We've seen other parts of Columbia and therefore have a general idea of what it looks like, so repeating the same area doesn't carry any more weight than an entirely new place.  Even if we hadn't seen Columbia, I think people have a general idea of what a post-war area looks like.  We didn't need to see Rapture before society collapsed to know that something had gone wrong.  Fire, corpses, and bullet holes are rarely the signs of a stable, peaceful society.

The type of destruction matters.  Contrast Columbia or Rapture with Azeroth after the Cataclysm.  Something big happened.  Yet if you didn't play before, what was it?  The slash across the Barrens is clearly a problem, and of course the fact that the resulting two zones still share the name of Barrens indicates to new players that something has changed, dramatically.  On the other hand, Thousand Needles, which old players will know was completely reshaped, looks a little odd, but the lack of fire and the underwater nature of the destruction means that it doesn't look as if it was radically altered.

Overall I think the lesson to take away is that destruction does not require a before and after picture set.  If the previous land was one to which the player had an emotional connection, such as a half-decade of Azerothian adventuring memories, then the knowledge of what came before is powerful.  Without the emotional connection, then it is less likely that knowing the past is of any use.  When there is fire and destruction of buildings (since we know generally what they look like, with vertical walls and horizontal floors), then it's redundant to give a picture of what it once was.

Far Crying out loud, fix your interaction

I've been playing Far Cry 3 a bit lately.  I'll have more to say on it later, but for the time being, here's this: It's a fun game, but the interaction needs work.

The key e, by the way.  And that's fine.  E is a great interaction key.  I'm a fan of it.

What matters is the interaction part.  There's a lot of "Hold E to interact" or "Hold E to loot body" or "Hold E to swap your fancy upgraded Swiss-made weapon for a $5 AK-74 knock-off made using duct tape and hubcaps".

The latter bits are one of the bigger annoyances.  It's a good idea to loot corpses, so I aim at the corpse and...  hm.  Nothing.  Maybe if I turn my camera this way a little and hit E.  Oh, I just threw my weapon on the ground.  Okay, hit it again ans switch that back.  Swivel slowly... slowly... and corpse looted!  Rinse and repeat for every single corpse because everyone drops a gun and you don't need it.

A similar problem occurs with skinning.  I must look strange, shuffling in a little circle staring at a dead tiger.

The problem, as best as I can tell, is that the size of bodies for interaction purposes is far smaller than their visual size.  Guns appear to be the reverse.

Space lets you climb ledges.  If you're facing just the right spot.  Otherwise you jump up and down.  Sometimes when you jump you'll end up mousing over the right spot to look at, just so it can taunt you.  "Ha ha!  Jump, pet!  Jump!  You almost had it!  It's right here!"

I learned the annoying way, it would be silly to call it the "hard way" that when they say "mash [key]" they mean "spam [key]".  In my mind, mash means to hold down.  Maybe they mean it in the banana complex, but then I'd need my hammer.

You'll soon realize that you only need a few of each animal skin to craft the items you need.  If you somehow need more, hunting isn't all that difficult.  Though deer are skittish.  Get a sniper rifle.  Thankfully, skins can be sold and there is a quick-sell option.  But that only sells vendor trash.  Crafting materials must be done one at a time, with a confirmation dialog on every single one.  I learned not to skin or gather plants unless I am actually sure that I need that animal, which I don't anymore.

As an unrelated tip, when they give you the hunting quests, you only need to use the weapon type, not the actual weapon.  So feel free to bring your slightly-less-terrible bow or really awesome signature SMG.  Stick with their rocket launcher, because that's really the True Hunter's way to kill a rapid dog.

Pollution is Bad and STALKER is Good

Life in a Nuclear Wasteland
This person must play, because otherwise the reference seems rather out-of-nowhere.  Surely there are other nuclear wasteland-glorifying media out there.  Or they could reference earlier Slate articles, such as this one about how driving out most of the people was pretty helpful for nature, despite the radiation.  Anyway, nerd-cred to that writer.

Radiation is an extreme example, but the story raises a good point: pollution doesn't magically disappear.  It may be diluted very quickly, but dilution does not mean that it is gone.  If a single source is diluted, then it may have little or no consequence for health, but when there are many sources, and they continue over time, then the consequences increase, dangerously.

Some pollution we can put somewhere else.  We send computer equipment to China where they dissemble it and extract the valuable metals.  The safety and pollution standards are effectively non-existent, so the mercury that doesn't get breathed in ends up in the water.  Though we can also see how recycling isn't a cure-all, at least not when the label is used as a marketing term (but good luck finding a place to safely store a pile of toxic waste).

I'm sure someone, somewhere is trying to use this to criticize computers and digital lives.  Heavy metals are pretty awful and computers use a ton of power (let's say 3%; the numbers vary a lot).  But that's only looking at half the issue.  What would we be doing otherwise?  Maybe we'd sit and read in the sunlight.  Or we'd find something else to do, something far more destructive such as driving or riding trains while shooting buffalo.  We probably won't do the latter, since we've already done that too much to do it much more.

Happy Earth Day!

P.S. Feel free to punch anyone who says you can't enjoy life, for the cause of protecting the Earth.  It's a great place, but what's the point of a great place if we can't have any fun?  Just don't burn it down or poison your neighbors.