Author: Mady

My group got off to a bit of a rocky start trying to play Fiasco.

It took us two laptops, and two Iphones (with rules and internet cheats) and a lot of frustration to get us started. With literally hundreds of pages in instructions, one would think that this game would be so well explained that a kid could play it, I would say this is definitely not the case.  This game could easily be explained in three pages tops in a much simpler way.  If it’s possible, I think the directions were too detailed.  I think it was hard to focus on the point of the game and pick out what was actually important out of so much excess stuff that was crammed into the directions.

Although I had lots a reservations about the game before we started playing, the annoying and lengthy instructions were really the only thing I didn’t like about this game; although I’m not sure it feels like an actual game to me.  I enjoyed creating a ridiculous story line with absolutely no purpose and seeing where it went.  Once we started, it flowed very well and easily and it was extremely fun and entertaining to work together to create an absurd story about drug dealing, love, murder, suicide, and a magic polar bear.  I did, however, feel like there was no game-like aspect to this though.  Nothing the game made us do seemed to make a difference to how the story turned out.  It felt as though we were picking and rolling dice for no reason, except for the fact that we were told to.  I don’t think that our story would have turned out any differently if we had been instructed to simply create a story with given options for location, character relations, desires etc.  I think a lot of the stuff we were told to do was sort of pointless.

Even though it was a strange game and like nothing I’d ever done before, I enjoyed playing Fiasco.  I enjoyed getting to physically get with other people to play again rather than just staring at my computer screen.  I enjoyed the collaboration that was involved and I enjoyed the freedom to make our story whatever we wanted it to be.

Having never created a podcast before, I was intrigued and a little nervous as to how the experience would turn out.  The process ended up working out differently than I had anticipated.  It was easy to fall under the assumption that Jordan and I could pick any video game that we wanted and magically have something astute to say about it that also related back to Bogost’s terms in his book.  This is not how making a podcast works.  We ended up having to start over once we got together to actually construct the podcast after we realized we couldn’t relate our original game (Mario Kart) back to any of the terms.  We then decided to work in the opposite direction.  After looking through the book and reading about each of the terms, we decided we wanted to do a podcast on exercise and then picked Wii Sports as our game to go with that.  After we were able to settle on an idea for our podcast the rest wasn’t actually all that hard.  We decided that I would pick apart the details from the book that related to what we wanted to say, and Jordan would research Wii Sports to look for anything that could be of use.  After that, we simply overlapped our work and wrote out what we wanted to say.  Bogost had a lot of interesting ideas about video games about exercise, “exergames” as he calls them, that we were able to relate to Wii Sports.

After we knew what we wanted to say in our podcast, we then had to figure out how to actually make the podcast, which was arguably the hardest part, even though it ended up being fairly simple.  I have used garage band a handful of times way back in middle school, but that is the extent of my podcasting experience.  I had no clue what I was doing.  It took me a few minutes to figure out what everything on the screen was and how to do what I wanted to do, but once we found our way around the application the whole thing came together pretty easily.

Overall, the experience was better than I was expecting it to be.  It was surprisingly easy to talk about a single video game for five minutes and turn that into a podcast.  My advice to future video game podcasters though would be to not save all of the work until the last minute.  Although the project is relatively straight forwards once you get into it, it takes a little while to figure out what direction you want to go in and get started with it.  If you give yourself a good amount of time to plan out your project, it should be a breeze.

These two games were very difficult for me to get through.  Dsy4ia didn’t really make much sense to me at all.  When playing it I was very confused as to what I was doing and why.  I felt like I was reading empowering words and then performing odd and simple tasks like little mini video games.  The message was interesting though.  I found it very captivating that this was the medium chosen to convey this message.  I think they did this because playing a game makes the issues feel more personal.  As a female playing the game, I felt as though the topics were relatable, but a male might not feel that way.  But by playing a game in which he feels as though what is being said applies to him, he might absorb what is being said more willingly.  Depression Quest, on the other hand, was hard to get through for other reasons.  It wasn’t very abstract and peculiar like Dsy4ia, and the point of the game wasn’t very difficult to figure out.  For me, it was too depressing, for lack of a better word.  Depression and suicide are somethings that have made an impact on my life in multiple ways so it was very difficult to be put into a situation where I as the player was the one suffering.  Maybe I’m not thinking openly enough, but I’m not sure if something that serious should ever be used as the topic for a “game.”  That could also be my dislike of the word game to describe it.  I think that the word “game” comes with certain positive and light hearted connotations that I don’t associate with the topic of depression.  Nevertheless, this game, like Dys4ia, gives the players the sense of feeling depression for themselves.  This can give people a bit of perspective on the issue because this is a way to experience it from the other side.  The game symbolically crosses out all options for the player to take that include trying to get out of the rut of the depression, this is probably because being happy and trying isn’t even an option for someone who is depressed.  I think both of these games go about achieving awareness for their issues by placing the player in the shoes of someone suffering from the issues at hand, forcing them to have empathy for others who actually are suffering, because they have gotten a taste for what that suffering is like.

These two games are very different in my opinion.  A common theme of the games that we’ve played, I’m not quite sure if it is in all games, is that there is always an end goal.  I think the difference comes mainly in how one gets to the end of that game.  Some games are more direct than others, not giving the player a lot of wiggle room on what they can do other than exactly what is necessary to get to the end; whereas there are other games in which there are tons and tons of things to do that arguably aren’t important to the game’s purpose at all.  Some games significantly help guide the player to the ending, whereas others focus more on letting the players figure it out for themselves.  I think it is in these ways that these two games are drastically different.  Each game has a set ending or goal that the player is trying to achieve.  In Beginner’s Guide, it is to figure out what the point of this all was and to see what the narrator is taking so long to say is.  In Her Story, it is to find out what really happened to Simon.  Her Story, in my opinion was a much less restrictive game.  It was possible to go off in one’s own direction without the game attempting to make sure you are still moving the right way towards the end goal.  In this game, there are plenty of things to do or moves to make that don’t help the player get closer to their end goal of solving the mystery.  I have always thought that this leniency in a game is something that I liked, but in this game it simply frustrated me.  Perhaps this is because I have been used to more structure from the games that we have played recently and didn’t like feeling like I was being set loose with no guidance in this game.  Beginner’s Guide, however, is much more like the structured games I have been used to playing recently.  In this game, I as a player didn’t do a whole lot.  I pretty much simply listened to the narrator tell me what to do, and then proceeded to do it.  I’m not sure that is very game like, but it’s nice not feeling hopeless without any idea of what to do.  I think a mix of structure and guidance of each game would create for the perfect game, a game that has a set end goal and helps steer the player in the right direction, while letting them still get to that goal mainly by themselves.

The Unpacking Manuel’s Assignment gave us the opportunity to pick a particular piece, out of walls are littered with plaques and pictures found from local stores and homes, at Manuel’s Tavern to analyze.  One of these pieces is a Miller High Life mirror with a dulled picture in it. To learn what I found out about this piece, check out this page, Living the High Life.