The Spodcast #5: Not E3, Bad Games, and Guardians of the Galaxy 2

… it’s in the bill of rights.

Regarding politics in video games: I’d like to repeat some very good fantasy/sci-fi writing advice I once read. To paraphrase, it was “it’s better to write a bad analogy for many things than a good analogy for one thing”. So you could write a fantasy story which is very explicitly about, say, the gay experience (e.g. X-Men 2) or racism in the real world (e.g. Deus Ex: HR) — but unless you are actually writing a one-to-one correlation for being gay or black or whatever, your analogy is going to fall apart.* In both of the above examples, the direct analogy falls apart because mutants and augs are legitimately different to typical humans — real-world gay or black people don’t have the innate ability to summon fireballs or lift cars. It’s better to write your analogies as something which is generally applicable to “marginalised people” or “class dynamics” or something similar, and work within the confines of the fictional universe to build the analogy instead of hammering it into a real-world hole. Dragon Age kind of manages this as a series, because it usually acknowledges that being a mage is its own thing instead of being a direct analogy for any real-world thing (and notice how the game falls apart when the writers forget about that and try to make it a direct analogy for the gay/black/Jewish/whatever experience?). Outside of video games, the Discworld series nails this really well. Dwarves in Discworld have their own issues with gender identity, sexuality, and race, but Pratchett never pretends that it’s got anything to do with actual real-world gender/sexuality/race issues (partially because he didn’t actually have a great understanding of real-world gender/sexuality/race issues as a writer) — and once again, one of the subplots in “Unseen Academicals” completely falls apart because he’s obviously trying to use the dwarves to say something about real-world sexuality issues, and it simply doesn’t fit.

*Gone Home escapes this because it actually is a one-to-one analogy for being gay in the 90’s, because it’s actually set in the 90’s and actually about being gay.

Re: breaking mechanically bad games for fun.
One thing I’ve been enjoying lately is the broken mess that is Might & Magic Heroes VII .
At release so many spells just didn’t work as intended (doing way more damage than suggested) and even after the few patches they did the AI is still terrible in combat at times.

One of my favourite things to do is cast a wall of fire on their troops. The way the spell works is for the next few turns anything that touches the wall takes damage, but for some reason if an AI unit is in the wall, it’ll spend it’s next few turns walking to a different part of the wall, taking more damage, and not closing in on your troops.
It’s like the AI strongly prioritises staying on fire vs doing anything productive.

I’ve now got the perfect idea for the name of this podcast. The title should just be a picture of Josh’s face.