A magic trick is really amazing the first time you see it, when you can actually imagine that everything that's happening is arbitrary and unexpected that led to something impossible
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Plutoburns and
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
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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
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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
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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
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect and
Terry Pratchett wrote a book Only You Can Save Mankind about this concept. The aliens from a shoot-em-up try to broker peace with the unstoppable warrior who has killed thousands of their people and resurrects every time he dies.
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Only You Can Save Mankind is seriously one of my favorite Pratchett books and every time someone mentions it I get the urge both to reread it and to replay TIE Fighter or Freespace 2
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