It becomes a lot less cool when you watch the trick being done a hundred times in a row and you see the magician having to do the same things in the same order every time and it's impossible not to figure out what the trick must be and that it's pretty simple
-
-
Replying to @arthur_affect @Plutoburns and
I remember one of the Metal Gear games had a really really blatant example of this Snake has to crawl through an electric torture field to make it to the switch to turn it off, and you have to mash the buttons to simulate this
1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Plutoburns and
And it's this long, agonizing struggle and you just barely have enough HP to make it before you die It's a pulse-pounding, edge of your seat moment the first time
1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Plutoburns and
Then as soon as you play it again you're like oh yeah You can't fail this part It's programmed to take away your HP based on your progress through the field so that you always end up with a sliver left before you die The tension is totally fake
3 replies 1 retweet 6 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Plutoburns and
(On TVTropes this is called Always Close It's a necessary trope, arguably, because either way you do it deflates the tension - if it is possible to fail, and a certain % of people fail over and over again, then it goes from being cool and exciting to obnoxious)
3 replies 1 retweet 8 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @Plutoburns and
i mean this is a reflection of games really struggling to provide fail-forward states as opposed to fail-and-reload states.
2 replies 1 retweet 2 likes -
Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect and
for me the strongest dissonance i ever had while gaming was Tomb Raider. in our world, lara dies over and over and over and over. but in the game world she never dies; she's just this unstoppable killing machine.
1 reply 1 retweet 3 likes -
Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect and
wound up writing a short story with that conceit--what it would be like to face this nightmare of the person who just can't be stopped, who gets to respawn and reload every single time you stop her. it remains an unsettling idea.
3 replies 1 retweet 3 likes -
Replying to @perdricof @Plutoburns and
Yup The biggest superpower in the game is your save file, which effectively is the same thing as having omniscient knowledge of the future allowing you to do everything perfectly The whole point of Undertale
2 replies 1 retweet 1 like -
Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof and
I enjoy how the "Groundhog Day genre" is all about exploring this in a realistic world Both Russian Doll and Palm Springs are about the rude awareness that your single player sandbox just turned into an MMO
1 reply 2 retweets 4 likes
And the degree to which actual games choose to integrate this into their fiction or not Like KotOR 2 straight up has it on the list of Force powers ("Precognition - occasionally, the Force will warn you that it's time to save your game")
-
-
Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl and
This has always been my take on Half-Life: that Freeman is effectively a probability explorer, still in some sense in the resonance cascade. If you look at the name of his thesis, I think this might even be implied.
0 replies 0 retweets 2 likesThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.