Editor’s Note (September 2026): This post was originally published in January 2016 right after the piece went viral on Tumblr. Ten years later, I have significantly rewritten this reflection to look back at the experience with fresh eyes focusing on what the moment taught me about the pressure of sudden attention and how I would technically recreate the pixel art today.*
I developed this piece as an entry to a contest on deviantart with the prompt: Elements.
My original thoughts were:
It is inspired by the many video games that represent the elements by crystals and I guess that’s why I immediately came up with this after reading the prompt. In this piece, the elements, fire, water, earth and water are represented by the crystals.
I chose a cave setting because surprise surprise, most of the time all the elements are found there. The rocky walls are the earth, its dark and wet because of the water flowing down into its depths, air blows through the nooks and crannies making it a very cold experience. And fire is what we use to light our way.
You could say they’re all represented in the piece without the crystals, and fire is there because there is light coming from somewhere. All the colours of the elements are reflected in the girl who I wanted in there because it just added more life to the piece.
I remember not getting much attention on deviantart when I submitted it but later I decided to add it to my old Tumblr blog. It had the most attention out of anything I’d posted before and it felt pretty overwhelming. Someone had liked it enough to put it on this Tumblr Radar and I awoke to all these notifications of people liking, commenting and following.
That amount of attention comes up with this feeling of obligation to try and be worth all that attention. It was both validating and terrifying.
I learned a fair amount from this piece and what I’d do different the next time. It was one of the few full scene images with a figure I’d ever done in pixel art. The animated part came after I’d done the full figure and I hadn’t separated out the figure from the background. I think if I were to ever re-create this image, I’d approach it differently – separating what I plan to animate from the background, breaking it up into background, midground and foreground, and sketch out the entire concept before I start the piece.
I’ve redone my blog theme and updated my about page. I think its more professional. Changed up my tagline too, I’m no longer a wannabe game developer, I am a game developer! I was inspired to be more self-confident about what I am based on a video I watched. It made me realise how I was coming across with that kind of tagline and how I was demeaning my skills. I feel a lot better about how I’m coming across. I’m slowly cleaning up old posts, basically removing low quality content. I’ve kept some old posts to show how far I’ve come even though I feel like I don’t come across in a good light? They’re not bad… they’re just not good, if you get what I mean?
I’ve also updated my about page since my old one was done around 4 years ago. I’ve included a list of my skills, links to my various pages and a summary of what I’ve been up to in my games design career. I’ve also caved and got myself a second monitor and wow… How did I ever live with just one? It’s making working on Realms of War a lot easier, since I can have the code up on one screen and have the website/ research up on the other. Nothing has changed visually yet, I’m thinking maybe I should just take the plunge and start using React for the client-side. It would make things a lot more secure. I need to write up a design document for the gameplay plans, since its currently all up in my head and who knows how long I’ll be able to retain that information.
I’m currently doing the 12 in 12 challenge, it’s where you finish 12 games in 12 months. You’d think that would be easy but I keep starting games and never finishing them… I also find it hard to start them, since I just have so many to choose from. I have over 500 of them on just Steam, so I have too much choice. I’ve decided upon:
Always Sometimes Monsters
Dungeon Keeper 2
Hollow Knight
Firewatch
Kentucky Route Zero
Majesty 2
Oxenfree
Persona 5
Soma
Styx: Master of Shadows
The Cat Lady
Death Stranding
Though depending on how short or how quickly I’m able to complete the games on my list, I might add more to it. I’m almost at the end of Persona 5 but I figure it counts since I’ve been meaning to finish it for years. I’ve also started some of the others
For January, I finished off SOMA. SOMA I’ve had a rocky relationship with. From the first trailer I was hooked, I loved the Amnesia series and I love the philosophical questions that sci-fi stories explore about the human condition. I waited and watched every trailer and looked through the website, getting any bit of information I could. I watched all the videos of the people talking to the machines, the machines behaving like they were living people and not realising their surroundings and all the concept art. I kept thinking over and over about what the teasers meant, what are they going to explore? It was very exciting. And, when it was finally announced for pre-order, I got it. Then comes release day and I can’t play it… I tried everything, looked through whatever information was out currently – which wasn’t much, and found out that the version on GoG didn’t come with a file which made it unplayable.
Years later I tried playing it, and my computer was just so old that it couldn’t really play anything more intensive than solitaire. It was a complete bummer… So, I bought a copy for the PS4 when it was on sale. I tried playing that and when it got to the part where the area floods, the application completly crashed and my PS4 complained when I tried starting it up again. My old PS4 was awful, I got it preowned and it couldn’t run Kingdom Hearts 3 when that came out. Years later, finally I was able to run it on my current system. Was it worth the wait? Yeah, I think so.
I didn’t play the game as it was intended to be played. I just wanted to get the story and get through it as quickly as possible and I kind of regret that I did that.
WARNING: SOMA spoilers.
SOMA biggest positive is the indoor environments. I find the outside ones quite bland, but that might’ve been a stylistic choice? I thought at first I was going to be terrified of the outdoor areas but they were more of a repreive of the claustrophobic-feeling of being stuck in these high-tech environments, surrounded by horrific monsters. Usually with underwater games I get this crawling sensation, and I feel super paranoid. It’s the same crawling feeling whenever I see spiders (I’m seriously arachnophobic), so it must be some type of phobia. Thankfully, I didn’t get that but there was this one section… It was near the end of the game and it was an underwater cave where the walls were covered by this deep-sea crab creatures. It was like the walls were covered by huge, white spiders and I had to run past them all.
The sound design was spectacular. I was basically playing on peaceful mode, but everything was still stressful and scary. There was one point, I was just immobilized in a room. A monster was patrolling around and I kept hearing it start chasing after something and thinking that it had found me. I managed to muster up the courage to press on but wow…
SOMA is a really sad and bleak game. At the end it really makes you think. Was all the events of the game worth it? Was there any meaning in what you ulimately accomplished? The characters go on and on about hope but is there any? You’re working towards sending a rocket into space containing the digitized brains of whoever had their brain scanned. It feels like a grave, a computer filled with the memories of people who don’t realize that they’re dead. I don’t know why I feel so weird about it. It feels like they aren’t real people anymore because they’re just simulations of a brain. They’re just copies.
Anyways, SOMA is a great game. It does have its problems but they might be just my system not being able to handle it properly. They weren’t that distracting anyway. I didn’t really experience how the monsters work properly due to me just wanting to experience the story. But I highly recommend playing it, at least for its creative and powerful narrative.
When Warcraft 3: Reforged was announced, I was excited. Warcraft 3 got me into Blizzard games. I remember back when I was a kid, I would play the campaign over and over. I would play solo games where the aim was just to clear out all the trees as Night Elf. I loved the maps where we could play races other than the main ones. I loved the lore and the characters. It’s what eventually got me into World of Warcraft, which has admittably been a major part of my life. When I was able to pre-order it, I did so immediately. I couldn’t wait to get into replaying the campaign, being able to play against my friends and see what they changed. I was in high hopes considering that Starcraft Remastered had come out recently and it was really well done.
I honestly should’ve known something was off from the beginning. The Culling of Stratholme cutscene that was used to basically sell the game was off-putting. I didn’t like the look of the human models, well the male ones. Arthas’ head in particular looked too small for his body.
Still I had hopes, at least if the cutscenes didn’t look the best, I’d at least still get good environments and gameplay. I followed the Beta. I even played parts. It… was pretty mediocre. The new graphics made everything lag when I tried playing against the computer. Thankfully there was an option to switch to the old graphics, which improved the framerate dramatically. The new unit designs were very busy. It was tough to really differentiate them. They stood out weirdly to the environment too. The icons for the units were vastly different from the old designs so it was tough to know from looking at it, what unit I was selecting. I had to read the names to work out what things were. It was also lacking the Blizzard style, a style I’ve come to fall in love with.
At the end of last year when the game was supposed to be out, they announced a delay. I’m honestly all for delays. If developers need more time to further polish and fix a game before it comes out, I think its the right move. I though that the extra month would address the mounting concerns people were saying. Then it came out…
Just what a disappointment. I booted up the game and immediately noticed that the clunky UI hasn’t been changed since the beta. The first screen that pops up is the login screen which I only learned was the login screen when I was DC’d while in the main menu. You’d think that since I’m coming directly from the Battle.net client, it would forgo that screen entirely or at least come up with a box telling me that I’m being logged in like other Blizzard games. Thankfully, when I tried playing the campaign I didn’t get the immediate defeat screen when looking through the options, like other users have shown.
I haven’t played long enough but players are reporting crashes, bugs, assets not loading that didn’t exist in the original games. Somehow they’ve not only poorly remastered the game but they’ve modified the originals too and removed key features:
Automated Tournaments
Clans
Ladder
3D animated campaign backgrounds
3D animated portraits in Battle.net
Communal channels listing
Custom Campaigns
Reign of Chaos campaign balance (Reign of Chaos now uses The Frozen Throne balance)
They haven’t delivered on their promises either. The redone cutscene that were used to promote the game were removed. There’s no extra content, the campaign is the same as it was in the original games, with all the lore inconsistencies.
Blizzard describes Warcraft 3: Reforged as a “complete reimagining” of its real-time strategy classic, which is probably the best way of explaining what it’s doing with the 16-year-old game. Part remaster, part rebalancing, part retcon, Reforged will be a major upgrade for the game that won’t leave players of the original behind.
To make matters worse, the new user agreement basically copyrights all user-created custom content.
Ownership Custom Games are and shall remain the sole and exclusive property of Blizzard. Without limiting the foregoing, you hereby assign to Blizzard all of your rights, title, and interest in and to all Custom Games, including but not limited to any copyrights in the content of any Custom Games. If for any reason you are prevented or restricted from assigning any rights in the Custom Games to Blizzard, you grant to Blizzard an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, unconditional, royalty free, irrevocable license enabling Blizzard to fully exploit the Custom Games (or any component thereof) for any purpose and in any manner whatsoever.
I mean… what a way to kill the longevity of the game. Not only can people not even join custom games or invite their friends to play a versus but this is going to kill off the custom game scene completely. People keep saying that this change happened because of Blizzard being salty about missing out on the success of DotA but it is to my understanding that the original developers of the custom game went to Blizzard with the idea first but were turned away before they went to Valve.
And to top it all off, you can’t get a refund for the game. Or rather it seems like it depends on who you get into contact with. It’s honestly bringing back Bethesda vibes. Here in Australia, we’re protected by the ACCC. If a product is falsly advertised or defective, we are guaranteed a refund. However Customer Support at Blizzard seems to think otherwise:
Nypolden at 15:15, Jan 30:
I can take a look and see. We do view all purchases as final so a refund will not be guaranteed.
You at 15:16, Jan 30:
well, unfortunately that’s not how consumer law works here in australia
Nypolden at 15:17, Jan 30:
Our Terms of sale state that all purchases are final. Accepting those terms of sale does mean you agree to them.
You at 15:17, Jan 30:
again, your terms of sale do not override consumer rights
Nypolden at 15:17, Jan 30:
You purchased a game from a US shop from a US company.
Ulitmately the user got a refund back but it seems it only hapened because they threatened to contact the ACCC. It really does leave a bad taste. I kind of want to refund on the principle of what has happened. But my account has so much which I don’t want to lose. At this point, I honestly wouldn’t put it past Blizzard to ban everyone who requests a refund of Reforged.
It doesn’t look good for Shadowlands and Diablo 4. If they can screw up a remaster of an old game that badly, what’ll they do to their new games? Blizzard, as of this post haven’t responded to all the outrage. Here’s hoping they do right by their fans and slowly patch it into a better state…
It’s that time of the year again, and yet again I’m attempting to revive this blog. Last year was a mess. I took on way too much of a workload and didn’t get anything done to a good standard. I’m really disappointed in how I handled everything, but I got into a really stressed, depressed cycle that now since I’m taking a semester break from Uni I’ve finally broken out of.
It hasn’t been the greatest start to 2020 either, I live in Australia and our country is just burning… I don’t want to go all political but we are basically screwed with our current government.
I guess though, on the bright side, I’m finally fully into game development. I’m lead artist of Aura of Worlds, whereas before I was just a freelancer.
Aura of Worlds has been a project I’ve been working on and off for years. It’s been presented at multiple PAXAUS conventions but last year we were all so busy with our studies/jobs that we decided it would be a better use of our time focusing on the game and creating more content for it. It’s currently out for Early Access on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/841600/Aura_of_Worlds/
Speaking of creating content for Aura of Worlds. Currently in the works is a redesigned Hub. We’re still slowly implementing the design into the game but here’s a sneakpeak. It’s not going to look exactly like this but it’s pretty close.
We’re working on the next world too. It’s an ice world called the Cold Crust Caves. We have numerous ice enemies implemented which players will be able to play with when the update comes. Story is coming in slowly too. The game isn’t a story-driven game but players will get an idea of what’s happened through the environment.
Build Your Way
I’m still slowly working on Build Your Way. Once I’ve done GUI and added some royalty-free music, I’ll finally release on Itch.io for free. I’ve been working on the game on and off for since 2014 and finally decided to use assets from the asset store to speed up its development. I recently got Lean GUI to get the GUI done sooner.
It’s gone through so much design changes but I’ve finally chosen something that I feel fits it’s simple gameplay.
I lost a lot of interest in developing this game because I couldnt get the AI working for ages, it wasn’t until I learned more from my studies in my Computer Science degree that I managed to throw together something that actually functions. It’s stupidly hackish and it’s embarrassing how long it took me to actually figure it out, but it works nicely.
One day, someday I’ll add the features I’ve thought up over the years but at this point I just want something decent looking on my Itch.io.
Other Projects
I’ve been just sitting on a lot of game projects not showing them anywhere, and I’ve decided that I’m finally going to change that. I’m planning on cleaning the ones that are pretty much feature complete, up a little so they run in a browser and uploading them.
The projects that I think I can upload with minor changes are:
Mushroom Racer – 2d, top down racer.
BlockUp – an experimental 3d platformer where players can pick up and move blocks.
Flower Smasher (when I find the project files) – a SHMUP with an experimental scoring system.
Space Runner – an infi-runner type game that uses a tonne of free assets.
Some of these I’m planning to go back to, namely BlockUp and Flower Smasher. I also have some other projects in the works too but they’re not at a stage to be shown:
Leaf’s Quest – an art platformer, with an emphasis on traditional art over game mechanics
Farmer Shooter – started this for ludumdare 41, it’s mostly coding atm but I’ve finally caved and bought an asset pack for the shooting part.
Realm of Wars – a web-based mobile-responsive idle incremental game.
Well that’s it for now. I’m going to be posting once a week about updates to my life/ game projects. Until next time, have a happy 2020!
I’ve finished retagging and cleaning up my old writing posts on here. Went through and merged multi-post stories into the one post because they’re not huge. I decided to do this first because it was the smallest task that needed doing. I also posted up some “new” old stories that I found while going through and sorting my files. They’re not the best, and very cringe-worthy but it’s nice to be able to look back and see how far I’ve improved with my writing.
I’ve started moving over posts from my now abandoned writing blog because I’m going to delete it. I don’t really see a point in having more than two blogs – my art Tumblr and this one. Having more is just way more work that I don’t need. So, there’s a bunch of them in my queue, they’re currently being posted twice a day. While going through my writing blog, I also found an old interactive story, that was a Twine Uni assignment. I’m planning on going back and rewriting/ finishing it. I want it to be more interactive and have the choices be meaningful in a way. It’s not going to be super open, but I’ll make the linearity of it more obscure. It won’t be a long story, but I want it to at least be more than some introductory thing. So, that’s another thing to add to my “TODO” list.
I streamed something this week, with a mic. I’ve done a bit of streaming before on my Youtube channel but with no mic. It’s because I get super social anxiety. But this week I started up a Bloodborne stream on Twitch and talked on stream. I’m quite proud of myself for that! Someday I might be able to make video dev logs! I’m trying to get comfortable with streaming so I can start streaming art/ programming games. I don’t have the best computer/ internet, but I’m going to try dagnammit! I also started playing Shin Megami Tensei IV. I think I picked it up a couple of years ago, and I’m just now getting around to properly. I’m actually really enjoying the story and the gameplay, which is surprising because I’ve never really liked turn-based combat. But I like it in this. The premise didn’t really interest me at first, which is why I stopped playing.
I’m a little behind with Uni/ art for AoW at the moment because of the public holiday and it being such a busy week at work. So next week I’m going to be playing catch up.
First things first, I really enjoyed the gameplay of the game, even though it’s not THAT interactive. You play as an investigator and your role is to trawl through pages of various websites and social media for datachunks. These datachunks are highlighted pieces of relevant information on the pages. Some are in conflict with each other, and you have to determine which is more in line with the narrative you’ve created for the targets you’re investigating. There are some that are quite clear cut, like there’s been a bunch of factual information that makes one of the datachunks seem quite unlikely but others are very vague. Vague enough that they could go either way, this is where your interpretation comes in.
Now, I recommend reading everything through because while you can just play the game from just reading the important datachunks and understand what’s going on. You, however, miss the context of the words being used and you’ll encounter situations where you you might incorrectly label a target as “dangerous” and a “terrorist”. I made that mistake during my first playthrough. I played so aggressively, not really reading through the information. I just assumed the worst of people and ended up making some terrible choices, with some grave consequences.
But that’s the point of it, isn’t it? You can’t correctly determine who a person is based on some tidbits of information that they’ve chosen to reveal. They could be lying or they could be telling the truth. A sentence’s meaning can completely change based on how it’s said, what tone is used, what their body language is and what bits of the sentence are emphasised. Because I assumed a person’s motives based on how they conducted themselves in a form that is lacking most of the conventions of a proper conversation, I misread the situation.
It makes you think about the information you’ve put out on the internet via the various social media outlets. Did you know that if you register a website, all your personal information is available to a whois lookup? You can take those details to find out where a person lives, what their house looks like, what their email is, and what other sites the person has signed up to with that email. Via the other sites, you can find their common alias’ and thus find more information about who they are, what they’re interested in, and what they apparently believe in. It’s kind of scary. And with all that information, all those things you’ve said; people can read into it and judge you on that. Which is happening in this game. Except it does go one step further and monitor the target’s phone calls, their text messages, the files on their computers, and their online conversations. You’re like a fly on the wall as the conversations play out, while they are completely unaware. I took a joke out of context and froze the target’s credit cards while they were chatting about it. It kind of makes you paranoid, because with the ways things are now, this kind of situation seems quite likely to happen…
Orwell is a beautifully short game, I think it took me over 2 hours to complete? The user-interface is easy enough to navigate and it’s pleasingly minimalist. The music isn’t too repetitive but it seems a bit contrived in parts. Like it builds up to let the player know that this is a stressful situation that you should be stressing over. I think the game was episodic? So each episode can be completed in different ways depending on what datachunks you send off to your supervisor, with each choice making a difference in the following episodes. Think Telltale’s ‘The Walking Dead’.
The game has multiple endings and the path I was lead down made me acutely aware that I was the antagonist of the story. It was like I was in those Big Brother dystopian stories where the protagonist is railing against the man. I watched as they made plans and were trying to figure out what was going on; all the while I was picking apart their words and using it against them. I felt… bad. Horribly guilty and yet I just had to keep going.
Just go play it XD You can find it on Steam for 9.99 USD. Though I picked it up while it was on sale, I can definitely say that it was well worth 6.79 USD.
I’ve been slow on working on my projects because I’ve recently gotten around to playing the enhanced edition of Skyrim. It’s been fun revisiting all the questlines I’ve played through before and discovering ones I skipped over. I discovered quite the bug and figuring out a workaround was frustrating.
I ended up roaming into Falkreath days ago, and learned that a guy had torn a girl apart and was now in the jail. I made my way over and talked to the guy, who I learned was called Sinding. I empathised with his strife, since he was afflicted by lycanthropy and was cursed by a ring he had stolen in hopes to control himself. So I took the cursed ring and went off to talk with the Daedric prince of the hunt. This was my first mistake. I saw Sinding transform and left the jail without watching what he did next. I’ll come back to this later. I hunted down the stag to summon Hircine and kind of agreed to hunt down the guy I just promised to help. I went off to do another quest because I didn’t really feel like doing that.
Cue two real life days later, I’ve joined the Dark Brotherhood, the Thieves Guild and the Companions. Basically done a bunch of different quests and I’ve decided to continue focusing on the Companions since I never really got far with them before. So Farkas, one of the Companions, decides that I need to go and intimidate a guy to progress in the questline. This guy being Sinding. The same guy I needed to hunt down for another quest. So, I’m like… okay. I guess I have to deal with him. I decide, logically that I should do the Companions quest first, because if I have to kill him that’ll fail that quest. I’m lead straight to the jail, which he should’ve already left by now. But, no. He’s still there and still a werewolf. I can’t interact with him, no matter how many times I exit and re-enter the jail.
I was very confused and I did a bit of digging online to no avail. It’s not like I could reload a save because I talked to this guy more than several hours ago. And I couldn’t use console commands because I’m playing the game on the Xbox One. I played around with what quests I had active and realised that the other quest’s marker pointed to a completely different area. So I went off to find him in this random cave and found a bunch of dead hunters. I looked all through that cave and he’s just not there. I checked my map and apparently he’s out roaming in the world.
I followed him to near Whiterun, where he’s this giant werewolf monster walking in broad daylight. I thought that he might attack me upon seeing me but I was able to talk to him and side with him. Apparently I now had to take on the rest of the hunters who were hunting him. These hunters never came, no matter how long I waited there with Sinding. I then had to look up the quest and he’s SUPPOSED TO BE IN THE CAVE! So I head back there but has Sinding followed me? Nope. No, he hasn’t. I went back to looking around the cave but this time I didn’t sneak around like I usually do. I ran at full sprint, knocked into those bone things and FINALLY the hunters spawned. And Sinding appeared behind me, like seriously out of nowhere. I figured I managed to fix whatever bug had occurred. I kill them all, quest done and I got a nice uncursed ring out of it. Sinding has decided to forever be a hermit and I’m like good. This should fix the companions quest and I can progress.
I look at the map and its pointing to somewhere outside of Falkreath, no longer at the jail. I can’t believe I thought it would be that easy but I hoped that it would be a simple brawl. I was so wrong. I found him again and he’s permanently in beast form. I literally had no way to beat him. My fists do shit all damage and his claws take a quarter of my life each hit. It was such bullshit.
I went through ALL this trouble to keep the poor sod alive. But no, in the end I had to murder him and fail the intimidation quest. I mean I was still able to continue past it but I went through all that and I still had to kill him. I haven’t checked back at that cave to see if there’s another copy of him yet but I’m just at the point of completely ignoring it.
I grabbed a few games on the steam sale. I think pretty much all indie games. Not the best idea I’ve had considering that I still haven’t finished Pokemon Moon and I still have hundreds of games to play, but ah well. So I actually played two of the games I picked up and finished them. These two short games were called Replica and Orwell.
I think I get pretty emotional when playing games, I get really invested in the plot and become very immersed because playing these two games made me feel very uncomfortable. Both deal with the idea of Big Brother Surveillance and I’m under the umbrella that if you don’t have anything to hide, you shouldn’t have a problem with it. I mean with cameras out on streets and stuff recording what’s going on. Y’know public places. But I draw the line at cameras in people’s homes or monitoring people’s devices to see/ hear their private conversations. It’s just wrong. I’ve always thought that people can misconstrue what’s being said because they don’t personally know the people whose being monitored. And I guess that these games have just reinforced my beliefs about that. It’s even got me thinking about the cameras that are in public places, like I completely understand why they’re so useful but are we giving away our privacy? Is this just a stepping stone to making us okay with the idea with further surveillance, after all if we have nothing to hide surely we should be fine with it.
Anyway back to the games. Both I highly recommend playing. They’re both kind of visual novels? Except I reckon it has a lot less reading and is a bit more interactive.
In Replica, basically you’re cracking into somebody’s phone and rooting around looking for any evidence that they’re responsible for a terrorist attack. You immediately find out that the person who’s accused is almost 17 years old. That leads you to figuring out the passcode for the phone. Everything the person has done on their phone, what social media accounts they use, what they look up for an innocent school assignment is just used as
ammunition to keep them trapped. It’s not hard to come to the conclusion that they had nothing to do with it but everything you find is just twisted. Anything completely innocent is made out to be villainous. You just feel horrible playing it. But there’s this burning curiosity to look further, to see what they’ve been up to, who they’ve been talking to. You always have the choice to stop playing and now you’re complicit. You, the player, are just as guilty as the person who’s making you crack the phone.
The game has multiple endings depending on if you follow orders or not, or if you look deeper into what’s on the phone. I think I got most of them but I had to look up a walkthrough. Basically I was trying to find out what the secret code sms meant, because I couldn’t find anything to interact with. I had tried earlier to call the number but I didn’t get anywhere with it. I kinda accidentally spoiled it for myself… just too damn curious, I guess.
Gonna have to split this post up into two since it’s getting pretty long. So next post will have my thoughts on Orwell.
Device6 is an interactive novel on iOS devices. It won Excellence in Audio, and was a finalist for Excellence in Narrative, Excellence in Visual Arts, and Seumas McNally Grand Prize. It was also an honourable mention for the Excellence in Design and Nuovo Award. The player plays as Anne who is suffering from amnesia. Anne wakes up on an island brimming with 60s aesthetics accompanied by an atmospheric jazz score. The player has to find out the truth behind Anne’s amnesia, the island and the reason for everything through and thrilling and interesting narrative.
The Stanley Parable is a first person exploration, PC game. It was originally a Half-Life 2 Mod, that became widely successful which allowed the developers to release a paid remake of it. The Stanley Parable won the Audience Award in the Independent Games Festival. It was a finalist in Excellence in Audio, Excellence in Narrative and Seumas McNally Grand Prize. The game has a limited amount of interaction where the player can perform actions in certain parts of the environment such as pressing buttons or opening doors. The narrative of the game is presented to the player via the voice of the Narrator. He explains that the protagonist Stanley who the player is controlling, works in an office building whose job is push buttons when prompted on a screen without question. One day no prompts come and Stanley not sure what’s going on or what to do starts to explore the building and finds that everybody is missing. It is then that the player is presented with the first choice which spirals rapidly into an exploration of the illusion of choice and unquestioning nature of players in video games.
“Oh no! Hunter on me!” he yelled, as he is shoved to the ground, claws of the creature tearing into him.
“I’ve been smokered!” she cried out, hanging from the side of the building, as the common infected beat into her helpless body.
Another is lying motionless on the ground.
“Help us! Come out and help!” I hear my team members scream, as they are incapacitated a distance away from the safe room. One is already dead, another is being ravaged by a hunter while the other is strung up by a smoker. Leaving the safe room now would mean game over. I would be taken out by a stray special infected, and with nobody to help me up we would all die. What do I do? Do I go out and help them? The moral dilemma was that I wanted to leave the safe room to save them, but I didn’t want to start over again.
Left 4 Dead 2 is a game designed around the idea of cooperation between the survivors. The game is survivors versus the zombies. But with it being a zombie game, the zombies still aren’t the only enemy. It’s not uncommon for other players to kill or leave other players behind to die.
It could be reasoned as Brian Sutton Smith wrote in ‘The ambiguity of play’, that these are the kind of players that “[enjoy] the power of being a cause”, or don’t “have power and in play [are] seeking empowerment as a kind of compensation or wish fulfilment”. That basically these players are selfishly finding satisfaction in leaving the other players to die to make themselves feel good. I don’t believe this to be the case in all situations, I believe it more it’s more than likely to be a case of Cognitive Friction.
Miguel Sicart explains in ‘The Design of Ethical Gameplay’ that Cognitive Friction is ‘the resistance encountered by a human intellect when it engages with a complex system of rules that change as the problem changes’. The phrase first coined by Alan Cooper in his book ‘The inmates are running the prison.’ The problem is, the player leaving the other players for dead, believe that they are doing the right thing by getting to the end of the level, thus progressing the team. The dying players, think the player who left is a deserter, and they should have stayed and helped.
This is evidenced by teams putting down the weakest team member to progress through the game. The players could be seen as seeking empowerment over that player, but in their minds they are making the terrible choice of saving health packs, stopping the potential of friendly fire, and slowed team movement. This is considered for the good of the team. But for that one player, it’s the worst experience. They feel useless, unwanted and betrayed by their team. I’ve been there before, I never thought that I would be in my betrayers shoes.
I was in a situation which was a lose-lose scenario. If I stayed in the safe room I was “the deserter”, my teammates would be upset at being left to die, while I stayed safe, making sure that we progressed to the next level. If I left the safe room to save them, and failed, my teammates would have felt even more betrayed, because not only would I have let them down, it would be my fault that we had to start over.
I stayed, they died. We progressed to the next level.
jesyikaturner 
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