Random Thoughts

[XCashier]

Dredging up the old meme machine: you have been kidnapped, and your rescue squad is the protagonist(s) of the last thing you watched. How does it go?

The last thing I watched was an episode of Torchwood. Everything got nuts but they saved the day, then Captain Jack Harkness chatted up everyone in sight.

[Ceir]

'nother thing from a rando blog that I added to my quote file.

"I don’t know what those ‘90s sci Fi TV writers were putting in their shows but I wish they’d start doing it again

# They de-escalated the stakes every once in a while so you can see what the characters are like when they're not under duress

# They made statements about the world through allegory

# They invested in depicting developing friendships and relationships between characters

# They assumed the audience was paying attention to the screen and wanted to be there

# ...and that their audience has enough intelligence to follow narrative clues and maybe even predict things"

And I'll add things like:
- not over-explaining every little damn thing
- not making characters talk like they're trying to get a good grade in therapy
- not taking the audience's ability to predict events and ending as a bad thing

...for someone who doesn't actually watch a lot of TV and movies, I sure think about it a lot. I think my conclusion is I don't like productions that treat the audience like scatterbrained idiots.

[Jay 2K Winger]

I think my conclusion is I don't like productions that treat the audience like scatterbrained idiots.

I appreciate productions that treat the audience like they're smart, but I also understand why that's not super common, because sadly a lot of people in the audience these days are scatterbrained idiots.

I'm with you on the whole "not taking the audience's ability to predict events and endings as a bad thing" though. Just because I can tell what direction a story is going in, doesn't mean the story is bad. As the saying goes, "it's not the destination, it's the journey."

Funnily enough, I did predict that sort of thing for The Penguin TV series on Max. For those who don't know, Penguin is a TV series in the same universe as the 2022 The Batman movie, focusing on Colin Farrell's titular character, in the wake of the ending of The Batman, specifically with Penguin's rise to power as the mob kingpin in Gotham. I was talking about it with a coworker who was also watching it, and I said, "Here's what I see happening. End of the finale, Penguin's standing in what used to be Falcone's penthouse, looking out the window-- just like he was in the movie-- but now he's the guy in charge, top of the world, no one can stop him now... but then he sees the Batsignal come on in the sky, like actually, bud, there's someone who can."

And then, when the finale comes out? It's not Falcone's penthouse, and he's dancing in his penthouse with his escort/paramour/girlfriend, who is telling him the things he wants to hear, including "Nothing's standing in your way now." And then we get a shot of the exterior, them dancing in the window... and the Batsignal comes on in the sky.

My coworker saw me the next day at work and said, "You freakin' called it, man." I just shrugged and said that I understand tropes and have a good sense of how I would shoot that kind of scene.

All that being said, I don't hate it if I can see the direction a story's taking, and I don't necessarily hate it if they throw me a curveball-- so long as that curveball either does make sense narratively, or can be justified through something that comes out later in the narrative.

[Ceir]

Not worth a Sickbay thread.

I just love (sarcastic) how my body's response to Too Much Slime - i.e. sinus congestion - is to Make More Slime. Burned through almost a box of tissues in less than a week!

[Ceir]

Purely as a thought exercise, I've been trying to come up with the most fair yet mean game possible, in terms of just totally stonewalling player expectations and being sarcastic about video game tropes - basically, the ultimate streamer troll. For what I'm envisioning, it would have to be some kind of generic third-person action RPG type thing.

In some ways it would be scrupulously fair:
- generous and robust checkpoints or quicksave/load system
- if there's an RNG chance of something, the calculations will be displayed and accurate (looking at you, XCom)
- if the PC dies, there will be a death screen explaining exactly what happened
- in general, information will not be hidden
- prompts and tutorials will be prominent, exact, and highly visible

And then the sarcasm and stonewalling kicks in:
- those prompts and tutorials that are prominent and highly visible do not go away until the player does the thing, you can't just ignore them
- dodge-rolling and bunny-hopping are absolutely options; constantly doing either is slower than base walking
- there is never anything behind waterfalls
- there is never anything inside Random Containers
- there will be a lot of breakables; there will be consequences for breaking them
- there will be a lot of NPCs; there will be consequences for harassing or hitting them
- attempts to shortcut, speedrun, or sequence-break will either lead to a 'back where you started' loop, or death

Hey, I never said it was a thought exercise in developing a fun game to play...

[Ironclad Alibi]

A couple more ideas:

- When a character dies they become a ghost that can't interact with anything.
- Random containers that are nested many layers deep.

[Ceir]

I hit these stretches where I just cannot find some Random Mundane Item at the store. This week, it's poster sticks. Not a frame, not the $20-a-set magnetic ones, not the jaw ones that clamp on and ruin the poster...just a basic set of "slide 'em on, occasionally readjust before it falls out". Not at Target, not at Walmurt, nothing. Go figure.