Show Don't Tell

One thing I occasionally hear people complaining about when it comes to games is that they are becoming too cinematic at times.  Sure there are plenty of great cinematic games like The Last of Us Metal Gear Solid or modern Final Fantasy and while the use of cutscenes is a fine way to tell a games story, it's the ones that marry the two that really stick out as great experiences in my mind.

Take a Souls game for example, this is an absolutely amazing case of a game marrying game play and story telling in a really masterful way.  When it comes to these games there's usually a scene at the start and a scene at the end and everything in the middle is straight game play.  Very rarely will a Souls game interrupt play to show you a thing and when it does it's usually just creatures flying you off to the next area or something like that.  That doesn't mean however that the Souls games are devoid of story, the world is teeming with all sorts of details that tell you a story by showing you what's going on rather than telling you about it.  Instead of having a bombastic cutscene of monsters killing people, it has you run through the aftermath and letting you put the pieces together yourself.  For more detailed parts of the plot you have to look to item descriptions for the things you find in the world which is a sort of interesting take on the tired cliche of data logs.

Another great example of a game that does this is Fortnite.  You wouldn't expect there to be much of a plot in a battle royale like that and there isn't but the game does subtle things that show the player how the world is going to change.  While other games may make announcements on a news page like "NEW FEATURE!" Or "map changes coming for the next season, Fortnite drops subtle world changes that hint to how the island will change for the next season.  For example right before season 4 started a meteor appeared in the sky and a few hints were left around the map as to where it was going to strike.  It was the devs way of saying "we are reworking an area" using the game itself rather than just announcing it on an update page.  

There's nothing wrong with the classic cutscene, I would never want to see it go. However when a game does marry gameplay and story the experience becomes much much more memorable 

Games Done Quick and Identity Gaming

I've talked about Games Done Quick multiple times on this blog but Summer Games Done Quick is currently running I'm going to talk about them yet again.  The reason I like to harp on about these guys so much is that they were so important in the creation of Identity Gaming that it's important that people don't forget to support them.

Before I get into my little story, fire up this link in a tab so that you can go watch them the second you've finished reading.

https://www.twitch.tv/gamesdonequick

Right now they are doing a marathon for Doctors Without Borders by speed running an insane number of games over the course of 5 days.  If you read this article after it's finished then don't worry because they do another marathon around January for the Prevent Cancer Foundation called Awesome Games Done Quick.  These are fantastic events and you should show your support.

But just how did an event like Games Done Quick help inspire Identity Gaming?

Well a handful of years ago, around the winter time, I wake up super early one morning to find a text on my phone from my mother telling me that my father had passed away.  It was a sad time as you would expect, he suffered from Alzheimer's disease so understandably I became interested in Alzheimer's charities and how these organizations help sufferers and their families.  Just after that passing of my father, Awesome Games Done Quick started.  It was an event that I had watched in previous years and having something like that to enjoy after such a sad period was nice.

When it finished they had raised over a million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation and that had me thinking that maybe I could try to emulate some of the work that they do.  Of course, I'm just one guy, a nobody with a blogger site, a stream and a YouTube channel so I knew going in I could never reach that kind of money if I only attempted something like this for 5 or so days.  So with that in mind, Identity Gaming was born as a sort of long term project.

Things were shaky at first, as you can see if you watch my early playthroughs and see videos of my early streams but thanks to the help of a number of friends and the people who donate to the Alzheimer's Society keeping me motivated I'm here today, still writing and improving in order to raise money for a charity that's rather close to my heart.

Sure, I'm not raising the million dollars in 5 days like the GDQ guys are but thanks to all the support £3000+ has been raised in a few years and that's fantastic.  I really owe it to the GDQ guys for inspiring me like that.  I get the feeling I'll be doing this for a long time going forward and it's all thanks to them.

Home Arcades and Hitchhiking

First off I want to apologize a little bit for the lack of content in the last week or so, things got a bit crazy and I didn't have much time to write, stream or make videos.  

Anyway I want to tell you a little story about my last Sunday since it's awesome both for gaming and to illustrate how awesome living in Japan can be sometimes.  

So my buddy who lives in the next town over likes to frequent his local video game bar (more on those another day) and he's managed to meet a few cool people.  

So we get invited to this guys house and my header picture was his goddamn living room, it was crazy.  The amount of stuff he has both retro and modern puts my attempts at video game collection to shame.  The guy had arcade cabinets, retro setups, a projector with next gen stuff, it was easily one of the best dinner parties I've been too 

The reason I'm bothering to tell you this tale is because there is this unfair stereotype I feel of passionate collectors of anything being lonely dweebs with no future and nothing else to really live for, which is a shame because it's just not true. 

So now for the Japan part.  On my way home I fell asleep and ended up in another town about an hour away from mine. It was late at night and there wasn't really anywhere nearby for me to take shelter in so I did what any slightly drunk person would do, stick my thumb up at cars.  

Astonishingly it worked and some guy gave me a lift all the way to Nagoya, we had a nice chat and all was well.  

I do notice on the internet that there's a lot of people who give Japan and the Japanese a bad rep, claiming that it's a country full of racists.  Well I think both these inconsequential stories prove this people at least a little bit wrong. 

Pen and Paper

So I know this isn't strictly "video" games but pen and paper RPGs are awesome and I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about them since I started playing again recently.

My relationship with pen and paper games started in a weird way.  I enjoyed playing video games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights on the PC when I was younger but the idea of sitting around a table with a bunch of people role playing sounded really fucking stupid to me.  Unfortunately I was one of those people who would look at this people and think they were a bit sad and pathetic, playing with dice and pretending to be elves.

So, fast forward from my early teens to 2010 when I first came to Japan.  I got a text message from another exchange student asking me to come and play Dungeons and Dragons.  Well at the time I didn't really have fuck all else to do and if I remember right a lot of students had gone home at that point to visit family for the holiday, so I decided to join.  I go down to the room, roll up a character and start playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition (lol)

My opinion of role playing was IMMEDIATELY changed.  There was a degree of seriousness to the role play but everything was tongue in cheek.  Combat was also insanely fun and considering that we were using nothing more than bits of paper and coins it was pretty intense.  We had a really good group that were willing to mix a bit of humor into a serious plot and eventually we got to a point where we were playing every day because it was so damn fun.

I played a few more DnD sessions after this but it just wasn't as fun, the groups were too serious and there was no room to be even a little bit silly, I yearned for those days with my old group and despite us trying our best to do it online, time difference meant our schedules didn't really match up.

Recently though I started playing Pathfinder with a group of guys here in Japan.  FINALLY I've found another group that are willing to strike a balance between a semi serious and interesting plot with a bit of humor.  The dynamic we have reminds me of those old days during my first exchange year and I'm at that point again where I'm getting stupidly excited for the next session.  What's even funnier is that the DM has set the games story within the Discworld universe and I was introduced to this group just as I started uploading Discworld onto YouTube, it's almost like some weird fate.

So, if you have never tried a pen and paper game and you're the kind of person who thinks its too nerdy even for you, I'd implore you to give it a go.  Find a decent group of people who aren't overly stupid but also not "my robe and wizard hat" kind either and you'll have an absolute blast.  Get your dice, get some beers and have a grand old time.  The freedom that this kind of game allows is INSANE and it's almost impossible not to have a good time.

Something Video Games Taught Me

This isn't going to be one of those posts where I take silly concepts from video games and turn them into life lessons.  I'm sat in a hotel on a Friday night trying to put something out in a rush before I go and hop on a train, so I thought I'd lay down something a little serious and maybe something a little personal, because why the fuck not right?

I feel like games have taught and inspired me to do a lot.  Hell, the reason I'm in Japan at all is because of my love for gaming.  It was my fondness of Japanese games (coupled with a lack of direction during my teenage years) that brought me to my decision to study Japanese at university.  But thanks to that here I am in a nice job in Japan living the good life.

I know it sounds stupidly cheesy but the one life lesson I think I took away from gaming is to never give up no matter what.

I like hard games, games that punish me and test every single bit of my skill and determination.  It's part of the reason I find modern gaming so disappointing and probably the reason I'm such a huge fan of Rougelikes.  It's stupidly satisfying to be sat there for a few hours dying over and over on a segment of a game only to end up getting past it and having only myself to thank for it.  Then when you eventually reach the end of that game it feels so triumphant.

So after punishing myself and seeking out the biggest challenges gaming has to offer, I've taken away a never say die attitude that I've applied to my life and I'm glad I did.  I'm not sure about you, the person reading this post, but for me, I've been told at nearly every point in my life that I shouldn't bother with X, Y or Z thing because it probably won't go the way I want it/expect it to go or some shit.

Let me give you an example of what I mean.  Back in my college days (the thing before University for you Americans) I had this teacher who I will call Mrs. V for the sake of this story.  This was quite late in the school year and pretty much all the students at my school had decided on what university courses they were planning on doing.  One day, during a class, she comes up to me and asks what I was planning on taking, to which I responded "Japanese".  One thing you have to understand before I carry on is that French at my school was mandatory up to a point and my results for French were....sub-par to say the least.

So after hearing my response she has this kind of shocked expression on her face like I just told her I was going to university to study murder or something.  She then says to me "maybe you should change, if you're French results are anything to go by then you'll probably fail"

At the time I laughed it off since manners towards teachers was held as a top priority at my school but inside I was fuming.  How dare this fat bitch who's been stuck teaching high school geography her whole fucking life tell me I'M going to fail at something based on my results for something TOTALLY DIFFERENT.  Students are going through a tough time at that point and I can promise you that if someone in her position said that to someone a bit less stubborn than me, they might have actually changed.

But for me, sure I fucked up French but that's just one Game Over and moving to a new environment to study Japanese was my next coin in the machine.  5+ years later, look at me now, rushing out a post on a blog from a hotel in Japan after a month of training in Tokyo for my new job.

So, just like you should never give up when playing a super hard game, apply that same determination to anything and I promise you you'll go far.  If you want something badly enough then nothing will stop you from eventually jumping over one of life's spiky death pits and smashing through the final boss of your own worry and self doubt.  Just don't forget to give the middle finger and stomp all over any small fry throw away pricks that try to stand in your way too.


.......

Sorry if this post is all weird or whatever, I think Tokyo has sent my head all funny with it's shitness.  Normal video game goodness will resume once I get back in Nagoya, promise.

Video Games As Art

This is a question I see a lot, so I'm going to have a small talk about it!

When I was with my buddy a few days ago, we were discussing what games could be considered "art" and why.  It was an interesting discussion but we were finding it extremely difficult to come up with things outside of the obvious titles. 

This isn't because there aren't any others, there are plenty of others, but it's because it's hard to pin down the rules behind why or why not you can regard a game a piece of art.  What makes this even harder is that the rules that govern my opinion on why a game is art will almost certainly be different on why you, the person reading this right now, would consider a game to be art or not.

What adds another layer of difficulty to the whole problem is that, in my opinion, games can be considered art in more than one way.  The music, the visuals, the story, the voice acting, writing, execution of game play elements, all of these things on their own could be considered art.  So just because a game has shit game play doesn't mean that there isn't some degree of artistry in the visuals or music, or even the story telling, but do these factors stop the whole game from being considered art or not? That's really only for you to decide.

Just to give a little example which I hope to expand on in the future, Nier is a game I'd consider to be rather artistic in the sense that the music and story were fucking fantastic.  That said, Nier is a game with repetitive game play and pretty crappy graphics.  Despite that I felt genuinely invested in the characters, plot and lore of that world, and was almost sad to see it end.  It yanked an emotional response from the lump of coal in my chest I call a heart, and that, to me, makes it something you could consider art.

I could probably write a fucking book on video games as an art form, but instead I'm going to butt heads with my friend and potentially make a video series about what games we consider to be art and why.   Keep an eye out for it but it'll probably take a long time to get that sort of project off the ground, but hopefully we'll make something enjoyable to watch.