Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. We've filled all the remaining spots for this year. It's been great having you along for the ride, and I hope reading all of this has been interesting, and possibly even the occasional bit of informative as well.]

Consoles are fun, and I have played a fair few, but most of where I cut my teeth on gaming, and many of the games that I remember playing a lot of, were on a PC. The Kaypro is my earliest memory, but most of my computer gaming happened on PCs running DOS. At that particular time, games have made the jump from being solely text to games with interactive graphics, but we haven't completely made the leap to the point-and-click interfaces that will follow them. But that is very much right on the cusp of happening.

At this particular point in time, one of the biggest genres of game is an adventure. The protagonist goes through a series of events, often picking up ites that seem otherwise useless along the way, only for them to come in handy at exactly the right moment to surpsass an obstacle and continue the adventure. One of the undisputed leaders of adventure games at this point is Sierra (On-Line). Ken and Roberta Williams have already done a successful job creating games for other studios, and where I enter this picture, they are involved as the publisher of several different series of adventure games. There's a fantasy series about the royal family of the kingdom of Daventry, headed by King Graham (who will be the protagonist of King's Quest I, II, and V, as well as a reboot King's Quest much, much later along the line) and Queen Valanice (King's Quest VII), their son Alexander (King's Quest III and VI, although Alexander doesn't know he's the son of Daventry until almost the end of III), and daughter Rosella (King's Quest IV and vII), which is Roberta's design and writing. There's also a King's Quest game called Mask of Eternity that's much more of an action-adventure game than the point and click / text parser games, doesn't star a member of the royal family of Daventry, and is such a tonal shift from the previous games that I've mostly shoved it off into its own continuity as an AU, even though the Wiki tells me that its story mirrors that of the first King's Quest, and it uses many of the elements that are common to the King's Quest series. (And that it was supposed to potentially be the beginning of a Gneeration II loop for the series.) It was also developed on the tail end of Sierra, before it became not much more than a name for Vivendi Universal to use on some of their games. (For example, the Sierra name is on Geometry Wars 3, even though that's not the style of game that Sierra would be morst famous for developing.)

Sierra developed a lot of different series following the model of King's Quest, for different stories and roles to take on. Sierra developed Police Quest in conjunction with the Los Angeles Police Department, and provided a copy of the LAPD procedures manual, not just as a copyright protection measure (in this era, a particular puzzle would have to be solved through the use of feelies that came with the game as a way of preventing someone who had bought or pirated the game from being able to go particularly far in it) but as a way of passing more than a few puzzles the correct way by following police procedure. I played a little bit of those games, but I wasn't particularly interested in taking on the role of a detective at that point.

Al Lowe developed a series of adult-themed adventure games following a hapless protagonist named Larry Laffer, who, thanks to his inconic outfit of a 70s-style leisure suit, game name to the series, Leisure Suit Larry. Larry distaff counterpart, Passionate Patti (who would star in Leisure Suit Larry III and V) had a similar lack of luck with finding someone, but these games were as much about confirming that sex is funny as much as they were more serious adventure games about sex. Not being old enough to play them at the time, and not really having been interested in going back to play them, that series is mostly getting mentioned for showing how much Sierra waws trying to hit everyone's niches for games. Where I would encounter Al Lowe's sense of humor is in his send-up of Western tropes, Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist, about a retired, one-eared gunslinger who just wants to settle down into a nice town and provide medicines for them. Unfortunately, there's someone who has their eye on the town (as it turns out, because there's a significant amount of oil underneath the town) and wants to drive all of the residents away so they can buy it up and make a pretty penny on the black gold. After foiling several of the plots that the antagonist puts forth, such as feeding horses lentils in an attempt to suffocate the town through methane inhalation or trying to stampede a herd of giant snails through the town, Freddy has to take up his gunslinger persona againt the forces threatening his town. And naturally, nobody knows who the "handsome silver-eared stranger" is until the very end. (And also, Al Lowe developed Torin's Passage, a game full of humor for both kids and adults with a teenage protagonist and his shapeshifting Boogle.)

One of the notable things about Sierra adventure games is that they usually had a score counter, so that a player could tell how well they were doing (and, incidentally, how far along they were in the game). Having gotten the population used to the score counter, there were some occasional tricks played on the player by it - Space Quest IV, for example, had an unstable ordnance that would give the player 25 points upon pickup, but when Roger jumped down a sewer grate to try and advance the plot, the ordnance would explode in his pocket and kill him. Putting the ordnance back where it was found deducted 20 points from the score but allowed the plot to proceed. The net gain of 5 points went unnoticed a lot, but would eventually help someone toward a perfect score. Freddy Pharkas gave 500 of the possible 999 points in the game for unlocking the front door of the pharmacy, because, frankly, it was the act that kicks off the entire plot. And because Al Lowe wanted to mess with people's perceptions of the game (since most Sierra games were scored to 500 points as a perfect game).

Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, under the moniker of "The Two Guys From Andromeda", were in the middle of making a bitingly funny send-up of science fiction shows and tropes in the Space Quest series, which would ultimately end at six games. Space Quest followed (Almighty) janitor Roger Wilco, who manages to stumble, bumble, and get lucky all the way through foiling several different potentially planet and/or galaxy-destroying plots, involving insurance salesmen, superweapons, body swaps, genetic manipulations, and more, at some point even ascending to the rank of Captain (of a garbage retrieval vessel) before his involvement in yet another potentially galaxy-spanning plot has him stripped of rank (and clothing) at a tribunal and returned to his usual rank of janitor for the final game in the series. There's a certain amount of thankfulness on their part that the series never made it to game ten, because, according to the time-travel plot of Space Quest IV, Space Quest X was supposed to be titled "Latex Babes of Estros." There's the possibility that the Two Guys, at that point, were doing a send-up of how science fiction tended to treat Strong Women by not only having them become damsels in distress, but turn out to be entirely girly and obsessed with shopping underneath their tough exterior. Also in that same game is cross-dressing as a plot point, and I suspect that some of the jokes haven't aged well at all, even if I remember most of them as being funny and parody of science fiction (some of which I might not have even understood at the time.)

And, the one I really considered a favorite (although Space Quest was a close second), was Lori and Corey Cole's Quest for Glory series, following a recent graduate of the Famous Adventurer's Correspondence School looking to make a name for themselves as an adventurer, and possibly right some wrongs along the way. The first game, So You Want to Be A Hero?, took place in Spielburg ("Gametown"), following the motifs of a Grimm-style fairy tale, with a guest appearance from Baba Yaga. There are fairy rings, creatures to slay, curses to undo, and the most important part about it is that the player character's data is exported at the end of the game and imported into the next one, allowing the adventure to continue with the same equipment present in the last game, although there always has to be currency exchange between the various places that the Adventurer ends up in for their next installment. Game II, Trial By Fire, took on a style from the Tales of A Thousand Nights and One Night, following innkeepers from the first game who are away from their home place (and also have a magic carpet to fly upon), III, Wages of War, explored African tales, following characters introduced in game II who were from a different region, in the same way the innkeepers from I were, IV, Shadows of Darkness, firmly rooted itself in Slavic folklore (and Baba Yaga returns to her normal place, having been driven away from Spielburg by the Hero in the first game), and V, Dragon Fire, centered on Greek mythology as its core background while bringing back a significant number of characters from previous games, as befitting the final installment in the series. V also shifted to the same action/RPG style that King's Quest: Mask of Eternity did, and had some issues with gameplay on the computers that I had, so I haven't fully finished it. I should go back and run the entire series at some point, because it's a series really worth going all the way through, from beginning to end, to see the journey of a single hero from newbie adventurer to seasoned Hero of several lands who has to defeat a dragon at the very end.

The other interesting thing about the series was that the game's puzzles were often solvable in multiple ways, based on what profession the player chose for their adventurer at the beginning. To max out on the content available, the player could choose to put their points in skills outside their regular set and build hybrids that could do all sorts of things, like fighters that can pick locks and cast spells, but just about all of the solutions involved had a strength option, a magic option, and a stealth option such that each character could approach the situation in a way that was fitting for their chosen character archetype and solve it accordingly.

There were several other series that leaned more into horror, like Gabriel Knight, Phantasmagoria, and Shivers, which I haven't played (although I do own some of them in bundles), because, well, horror is not exactly the genre that I want a whole lot to do with, being easily startled and not necessarily interested in either seeing a lot of gore or in being terrified all the time about what might be out there lurking for me. There were some murder mystery games that I did play (both of the Laura Bow mysteries, The Colonel's Bequest and The Dagger of Amon Ra), and those were okay, but they still had quite a bit of jump scare involved. Of the games I enjoyed playing, there were often many different ways for the player character to die, most of them were usually in a humorous way, with a snappy message at the end and the options to "Restore, Restart, or Quit". Which is where I learned the first important rule of any given Sierra adventure game: Save early, save often. Some puzzles could not be solved without the proper item, and usually, getting stuck on a spot in the game meant that there was some part of the game that had been missed earlier that would reward the player with an item that was useful for the current seemingly-impassable situation.

(And, okay, some of the fun of playing Sierra games was finding all of the creative ways there were to get yourself killed, just to see all the death messages and pictures that would come of them.)

Some problems even had multiple solutions to them, some of which were worth more points than others. For example, there are two ways to kill the definitely-not-a-Terminator robot in Space Quest 3. One involves knocking him into a dynamo at the right time. The other involves luring him underneath a set of creatures that the player has already discovered are lethal and react to sound, hiding and then using the sound to have the creatures attack the Terminator robot. That version also uses an item that was otherwise obtainable but unknown in purpose to retrieve the key item the not-Terminator was wearing. So there's a lot more points at stake doing it the hard way. Kind of like luring a robot intended to blow up anything organic it comes across into the cave of something big and mean that will happily use Roger Wilco as a basketball if it catches him and letting the two of them hash out their differences. (Spider-droid wins.) The droid could be avoided, the creature could be destroyed by giving it your container of instant water ("pure hydrogen! Just add oxygen!"), which is will happily consume, with the expected effects of having consumed a container of p0ure hydrogen, and so long as Roger doesn't die of dehydration because the player is efficient in their movement, the other solution might never be discovered.

Sierra eventually went on to acquire a company or two, like Dynamix, which opened up their software library some, but also gave us great adventure games like The Adventures of Willy Beamish, where a delinquent student manages to foil more than a few plots from the local richie-riches involving frogs and pollution. Willy Beamish had an interesting mechanism where player decisions might get them in trouble with his parents. Too much trouble would result in a non-standard Game Over where Willy is sent off to military school to curb his troublemaking tendencies, but there's entirely a few things here and there that are necessary and good for the plot to continue that will get Willy in trouble if he's discovered doing them or doesn't hide his evidence quite well enough. But it's a fun romp through being a child and managing to somehow succeed at foiling a plot that's eventually meant to frame your father for all the pollution that's happening, and whose climactic action takes place on a giant toilet bowl, no really. Dynamix also did a licensed game in Raymond Feist's Midkemia that worked quite well, although I had to get used to the first-person perspective to do anything at all.

As you can guess, I spent a lot of time playing adventure games, and there would eventually develop a competing school of thought to the Sierra-style "save early, save often, here, have some amusing death messages to take the sting out of the fact that you're still going to be doing this sequence again and again until you get all the actions and their timing right." LucasArts, while really well-known for their Star Wars tie-in games (since, y'know, LucasFilm were the people who did the movies) also produced several adventure games on the model that killing the player character isn't really a useful idea for good gameplay. While Maniac Mansion still had issues of captures and game-overs possible, its sequel, Day of the Tentacle, fully embraced the zero-deaths idea and otherwise made the price for experimentation and failure to be essentially zero, as items wouldn't break if used improperly, and characters could be infinitely taunted into putting themselves into terrible situations where the protagonists would have the opportunity to get it right. It's also a time-travel plot, where the three main characters are spread out across the "present", the supposed past of the colonial United States, and a dystopian future where everything is run by sentient tentacles and humans are kept as pets for their amusement.

The licensed game Sam and Max Hit The Road, based on the Sam and Max comics (which I didn't know existed until well after playing the game) followed a dog private investigator and his hyperkinetic rabbity-thing friend across the United States, going to tourist traps and attractions to try and solve a mystery involving mole men, Bigfoot conventions, and a country star whose ego is waaaaay bigger than his actual height. Max's solution to everything involves violence, and occasionally, Sam lets Max threaten others, or uses Max to do something specifically violent, like dunking him in the water of the Tunnel of Love and then applying the wet Max to the ride's electrical board, causing it to short and opening a path to find an inhabitant of the ride who isn't interested in much, but has useful information to give. Sam and Max also had an interesting arcade-style game involving Max surfing on top of the car and trying to bounce up and down on top of the various highway signs along the way. Good for relaxing and letting the brain work on whatever puzzle was causing issues at the time.

This no-deaths idea of LucasArts is best known, however, for the Monkey Island series, following pirate Guybrush Threepwood on adventures and tales involving treasure, cursed idols, cursed zombie pirates, insult combats, and many, many possible places where it looked like Guybrush might actually end up dying, only for something comedic to happen that keeps him unscathed, and in at least one instad, a direct parody of the Sierra-style death message, before the fourth wall gets unceremoniously shredded and things return to their usual comedic hilarity. Sadly, LucasArts didn't make nearly enough of any of these kinds of games to be a serious contender for all the things that Sierra was putting out as well, despite these games being really good, and eventually Lucas-Everything would be bought out by Disney.

Sierra itself, even after the success of being Valve's publisher for Half-Life, would eventually be bought out by Vivendi Universal, which in itself would be bought out by Activision-Blizzard. At the time of the Vivendi purchaswe, though, the writing was definitely on the wall that the era of adventure games they had pioneered and ridden to great success would come to a close. Many of the developers for Sierra games are in the process of making or have already made other games of the same style. They might not be explicitly in the same universe, but they are there and it's a nice thought for the demographic that grew up on Sierra's various games and wanted to be sure that the people behind them didn't just fade away into obscurity, a fond memory of a time gone by that will never return.

Additionally, it's not like the point-and-click adventure game went away, necessarily, just that as graphics got better and computers faster, and the demographics of who owned a PC and who played games on them changed, the adventure-style games of the Sierra era changed more toward twitch-action styles, like platformers and FPSes. And adventure games of the Sierra style also branched out into things like hidden object games, FMV games, and, once the United States got obsessed with more than just console RPGs coming from Japan, visual novels. And, of course, Sierra's name gets bought out in the early stages of the World Wide Web, before ubiquitous broadband and digital delivery and the utter explosion of content that comes with that.so now, you can see that the genre never really died, and that these days, there are plenty of indie authors who are taking up the torch in the same way and developing games that are either throwbacks, homages, or entirely new directions for the genre to go in, led in many ways by Telltale Games and their episodic licensed game properties.

Most, if not all, of the Sierra-Dynamix catalog is available on the game platform of your choice, with or without DRM attached. Or, depending on which game you may have a hankering for, if you also played a significant amount of that catalog, their spiritual successors or imitators are also available, usually on the platform of your choice. The environment where I learned a lot about gaming, and a lot about puzzle-solving in games (which usually amounts to "try everything, even the things that seem counter-logical, because something will usually work.") is the Sierra Adventure game, and the other games that Sierra-Dynamix were involved in creating. And that's before we talk about the Incredible Machine, Gobliiins, and so many other games that I could spend several thousand more words on describing in detail that were also Sierra-related, even if they weren't specifically first-party Sierra-Dynamix games. That would probably be a December Days series all unto itself, really, if I just wanted to pluck games from my childhood and describe them in detail and why I remember playing this particular game. I'm not entirely sure, however, that anyone other than me would be interested in that kind of a series. Because it would be deeply personal, entirely idiosyncratic, and unless you also have played that particular game, it would be a lot of text about something that you haven't experienced or played yourself. And it wouldn't be a Let's Play, or a speedrun, or something where you could at least watch the game while someone was providing commentary. It would all be text.

Anyway, if you want to take a tour of the potential nostalgia halls, or learn a bit more about why I'm particularly nostalgic for this company that only exists in name now, SierraGamers exists, and has a significant amount of information and scanned copies of the feelies and ephemera that came along with being a customer of the company.

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. There's only a couple spots left before we're done, although I hear from many of you that I am perhaps more knowledgeable about these things than y'all. I don't want this to stop you from making suggestions.]

It was announced as a collaboration between The House of Mouse and Square. "It'll never work," was the general, if cautious, consensus around the matter. Disney, after all, had built itself an empire in cartoons and princesses under its own name. That the empire also included a lot of other things in all the other names that are also part of the Disney family might have been a sign to the skeptics that there was something more going on there than appeared at first. Square was responsible for the Final Fantasy series of role playing games, and tended to produce epics involving saving the world with a ragtag band of young adults with special abilities. Disney was bright, Square was dark. Disney was explicitly a family-friendly kind of company, and Square had no qualms about permanently killing the cute White Mage at the end of the first disc of a four-disc game because that was what the plot needed. How would these two very different companies find any sort of common space where they could both tell a good story?

Well, you can see the beginning of the series, which has muted the pop song in the opening (I'm okay with this). A child on the edge of destiny dives into the depths of his own heart and finds the power within himself to fight against the darkness in his and other hearts.

Kingdom Hearts, as a game, takes the idea that the stories of the various Disney movies and properties are separate worlds, with each of their characters intact. King Mickey rules over all of them from Disney Castle. Normally, the worlds stay separated by barriers that prevent their crossing, but both the forces of darkness and light can cross between worlds using technology or magic. The encroachment of the darkness and its consumption of various worlds is part of a much bigger plot involving time-travel, trying to absorb the primal energy of the cosmos, and a whole lot of people trying to discover, experiment on, and unlock the secrets of the hearts present in most beings. The actual plot of the series spans several games over many different systems, including mobile phone games and games for the Web / Android platforms. Most of the plot itself is carried by characters created specifically for this franchise, and, regrettably, as the plot goes on, the Square characters, from the various Final Fantasy incarnations, drop out significantly to make room for the story being told. The Disney characters stay, because their worlds are the destinations of the various places (with a couple of new worlds created specifically for the game), but Square's contributions to the game are more and more the original characters created, including the various Keyblade Masters, the Organization looking to consume all the worlds in darkness, and a mysterious group who are behind all the various incarnations of Xehanort, trying to prevent another Keyblade War like the one that destroyed so much in its wake.

Also, many of the opponents in this game hat Sora and company have to deal with are downright cute, even as they are completely lethal. The character designs for the game are really rather stellar, and Sora and his companions have enchanted clothing that allows them to look and act as if they were an inhabitant of the world they have landed in, so there's a pretty significant amount of costume changes throughout all of the games for that trio.

There's also a lot of really gorgeous music for the series, that continues through all of the games, with themes and battle variations and a whole lot of great stuff that comes with it. Since I enjoy having a good soundtrack to play games to, the care and craft that happens with the audio is very handy to have. (Even if for other people, the background loop of music is a thing that is a problem for audio processing or just having something dig into the brain.)

One of the things that doesn't go so great in the Kingdom Hearts franchise is that the overarching plot and storyline are really carried through all of the games that have been released. If you were a person who had just played the numbered games in the series, instead of all of the non-numbered games ((Re:)Chain of Memories, (Re:)coded, 358/2 Days, Birth By Sleep, Dream Drop Distance, Final Chapter Prologue, and (union) cross), then after the games of I and II, which cover Sora and Roxas and their fight with Organization XIII, Kingdom Hearts III (which came out thirteen years or so after II) then reintroduces the Organization, but also has a new incarnation of Xehanort to contend with as well as the appearance of characters that have never been referred to in any of those previous games that are clearly very important to the plot. There's so much that gets missed out on, and so having a lore document (or one of the summary videos, or spending a lot of time in Lat's Plays) is essential to understanding not just the plot, but also getting it in a form where the whole of everything can be understood and things that are only resolved across different games can be figured out.

And, if you are a person who enjoys turn-based RPGs, Kingdom Hearts is not that. It's more of a stylish combat game or an action RPG, rather than the turn-based things that Square was much more known for. However, if you're salivating at the remake of Final Fantasy VII that will be coming out in March of 2020, I suggest running as much of Kingdom Hearts as you can before then because it will give you practice on how to handle the stylish combat system of the FFVII remake.

Kingdom Hearts was a game that didn't seem to have a chance of working out, but Disney and Square managed to put together a series for the ages. And there will be more of it, as all of the games discussed so far, with the exception of (union) cross are just the sequence they've called the Xehanort Saga. There's a lot more out there for these worlds to explore, and now that the Master of Masters' apprentices have returned to the current time, there's still another Keyblade War that needs preventing and worlds that need protecting.

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]

Once games had the ability to be more than "Here's a loop, if you complete it, reset the loop and increase the speed / start the loop one line lower," the concept of discrete levels and rooms expands the possibilities of games significantly. Space Invaders gains significantly more complexity when Galaxian and Galaga arrive, not just because the invaders take unique patterns to get into their swarm formations, but because each wave is a different formation composed of different members, which require different techniques and are of differing threat levels to the player character. (It also introduces a mechanic where a player can temporarily let a ship get captured by the opposition and then, if they are skilled enough, they can free the ship with a well-placed shot and proceed from that point forward with two ships next to each other, firing side-by-side at the invading opponents.) Admittedly, an entire generation of game-playing people think of Super Mario Brothers' Worlds, with discrete levels as their first thought on this structure, they have Donkey Kong's success to thank for this "level-with-stages" structure working out as well as it did, since Donkey Kong was one of the first to make the game loop have progression between stages, instead of having the complete gameplay experience available on one screen, as Pac-Man and many of the Space warfare games did.

For me, while I will get to Donkey Kong in due time, because it has an Atari 2600 part where only two of the original four stages are produced in the level loop (and without many of the fancy graphics present in the arcade or NES originals), the first encounter that I have with a Donkey Kong-type game is Ladder, written for a Kaypro computer that was at least briefly part of the family (which means I have seen, although I don't remember how to work, CP/M as an operating system), that I didn't particularly felt like I was all that good at, being, again, six or seven, and that also had an implementation of Hunt the Wumpus, which I seem to recall I didn't play much. There was a reason for it, and it probably was that it was a difficult game for my six year-old self to avoid either falling down the pit or stumbling into the chamber of the wumpus and getting killed by it instead. Might also have been a very text-heacy game, and while I was good at reading texts, I might have been interested in reading other texts than that particular one.

In any case, The concept of levels and stages also allows for the introduction of the puzzle game, where instead of repeating the same set of stages in order, and where one could develop, essentially, a perfect play algorithm with enough time spent analyzing the patterns of the game, in puzzle games, each stage / level may have the same objective, but the components of how to achieve that objective and the hazards in the way of accomplishing that task have been changed. (If you wish to be pedantic, to a certain degree, all games are puzzle games because they set a task before the player and give them tools to accomplish those tasks. However, outside of the puzzle game genre, the emphasis is usually on some aspect of the game other than solving the puzzles, like dodging invaders, barrels, or wiping the screen of attackers before progressing to the next point. A lot of puzzles, at this stage, are based around platforming ideas of running, climbing, and jumping, and the characters involved may or may not have abilities to defend themselves with.

Two of the iconicentries to the puzzle genre that tae full advantage of requiring both brains to plan moves and the timing abilities to execute them are Lode Runner and Lemmings. I have only ever played the latter, both both of them are broadly similar - guide the character(s) across a stage full of hazards to accomplish their goals. Lode Runner is a single character with a set of abilities that have to be used in the correct ways so as to gather all the gold bard on any given level, Lemmings is a stream of creatures that can be assigned particular abilities to inluence the path they are walking upon to avoid hazards that will crush, mutilate, slice, or drown them, with a specific percentage of the whole required to make it home in the time alloted. (Often, this means that before the pathway is fully clear, the player has to increase the drop speed of the lemmings to give them enough time to make it all the way to their destination.)

Lode Runner is also important in the history of gaming in that it was one of the first games to ship with a method for players of the game to create their own levels. Such that if a player had friends or wanted to continue playing games past the official levels, there was a significant amount of replayability that came with the game. (And while it would be a while before BBS, newsreaders, and other forms of Internet access to stored fles were stood up and people could post their level creations, moving levels across on disks and discs was usually possible, or drawing the level design out on paper and then using that blueprint sketch to recreate the level on another person's computer.) I suspect this is also the point where we started seeing levels whose sole design was to be as frustratingly hard as possible, if not outright impossible to complete. Presumably, the level editor checked to make sure there was a player, at least one object to collect, and a goal zone designated, but I'm not sure how much it would check to make sure the level was actually playable or traversable. (This idea of beastly hard but theoretically winnable games spawns its own entire genre, starting with the Kaizo Mario World edits to Super Mario World SNES ROMs and waltzing all the way through games suc as I Wanna Be The Guy. Because apparently, there are people whose masochistic streaks take the form of Jason Fox's attempts at passing the otherwise unpassable.)

Not all games bundle a level editor with them, which is a bit of a shame for some of them, like brick-breakers or other such things where being able to make and play your own level creations would be a way of showing off your creativity (or sadism. Sometimes both.) Level editors are often a good way of introducing smalls to the concepts involved in programming and game design, as they give someone a limited amount of resources to work with and a specific goal to make a level that works and is enjoyable to play for the target audience. A small who gets interested in this idea at a young age and builds some skills with it might be able to resist the influences of others around that suggest a person of their gender presentation should not engage in things like level or game design. (THBBBBBBBBPTH and fie on you if you suggest such a thing to anyone. A significant amount of problems with many subcultures can be directly traced to their attempts to gatekeep interested others out because the people already in wanted to make their experience exclusive, instead of inclusive. Don't do this.)

For other games, often the first-person shooters developed and released by id tools were developed and released separately to not only construct new levels, but to allow for manipulation of game assets (so that one could not just create a door, but specifically a door that required a blue key to open, or a door that opened and closed itself without human input at set intervals. These attributes were often associated with the objects themselves, so you would put the door in first, then edit the door's attributes to say "needs a blue key", "starts open", "starts closed", or "can't be opened with the action command at all." Additionally, the ability to set triggers that would happen when the player, or a monster, or a projectile, or anything else, touched the part of the level associated with the trigger made it possible for people to design their own levels that played even more like the actual game itself, because they were using things that had been built into the game itself and were possible through the engine that drove the game. So you still had a fair amount of levels that were playing Kaizo games, sure, and some that were essentially completely new campaigns that could be loaded, one level at a time, and at least one memorable Doom level that was, essentially, a domino palace, except that the dominoes were explosive barrels that would end up killing the player character if they were too close to the action. (The judicious use of a cheat code to engage God Mode was suggested in the file documents so as to avoid this pesky problem and see the explosions in their full glory.) I think that there was also a major boss character in the stage who would very easily be felled by the collective explosive power on display, just for the fun of it. And who might also set off the situation themselves with their own weapons and result in their destruction (and the player's, too.) There may be more than a few levels developed for these kinds of games that rely on the player knowing the appropriate cheat codes and deploying them, because once they're known to work and exist, sometimes people will design levels that are unplayable in the sense that a player that isn't cheating won't be able to win or succeed at. Possibly because someone thought they were making a Kaizo World and instead just stuffed it full of traps and enemies without a thought about how it would play.

Some scripting applications were meant to abstract a certain amount of the code away and provide some visual representation of the level beig built. Others went specifically in the direction of showing as much of the code as possible, with the idea that by learning how to build levels, triggers, and interactions, a person might learn the underlying coding language more generally and be able to put that to use in other situations and with other games or applications. (Quake, for example, had QuakeC, a custom scripting language that handled specific parts of building Quake that other tools did not. It wasn't quite actual C, but things learned using it gave someone an idea of how the C language works that they could put to use in other places. Combined with level and asset editor tools, a person could change as much about Quake as they wanted to. Thus came the era of mods, which came in a few different flavors. Some mods did relatively simple things, like changing weapon to something that had different projectiles or making items behave differently. More involved mods would have more things changed, and if the changes were sufficiently different from the base game, they might be classified as "partial conversions" that may have kept some amount of the original game, setting, or otherwise, but also had a significant enough difference that someone might, instead, be playing a different game. At the far end of the modding spectrum are "total conversions" that completely overhauls game assets, levels, and basically provides a completely new experience running on the same engine. Several total conversions for other games would end up becoming games in their own right, like the very popular Counter-Strike total conversion for the original Half-Life. (Counter-Strike may have been more popular than Half-Life itself, and I remember at least one package of Half-Life things that offered the original game, its two expansions, Opposing Force (where you play as one of the Special Forces sent into Black Mesa), Blue Shift (where you play as a security guard at Black Mesa), and Counter-Strike, the most popular total conversion for Half-Life, reworked into a stand-alone game of its own.

Both partial and total conversions took advantage of the newly networked world to distribute themselves. Buying a game that had scripting and level editing and asset editing tools available for it meant potentially a lot more game for your money just through playing the mods, levels, and scenarios developed by the community and released for free. (There were some that might have been available for a fee, but those kinds of things were always in flux, much like all other fanworks, as to whether that was a good idea to do or was just asking for the lawyers to descend with a Cease and Desist and remove the thing entirely from the community.) It also meant that more people got to experience Sturgeon's Law firsthand, but what's trash for one might be treasure for others, depending on how they want to play the game and what they think of as a fun time.

And then there's Minecraft, which takes all of these things that have been popular in the past and puts them deliberately into the game itself. Rather than something like RPG Maker, or other tools that allow someone to create games of a certain type, Minecraft's Creative mode is a giant sandbox where anyone can create just about anything, whether through assets available in the game or through coding in new extensions and games through the use of the Java programming language. There's also Survival mode for the original game, which teaches recipes and is an adventure story about gathering resources, staying alive, and eventually defeating a powerful creature in the Nether. But Minecraft (and its somewhat free-to-play cousin, Roblox) spawned an extremely robust modification community as soon as it became clear exactly how much freedom a person has in the game to do things, which can range from recreating architecture from our world (in block form) to constructing fairly advanced calculation engines by building logic gates through the use of redstone. And what can't be done in-game might be able to be done out of game with the appropriate Java knowledge, and indeed, I suspect there are more than a few people, smallings included, who have cut their teeth and learned how to program significantly in Java because they wanted to make a Minecraft mod and the redstone wasn't completely able to do it at that point. (Which is to say that you can emulate an Atari 2600 using redstone, so if you're going to Java, there's a good chance it's not just a 2600 you're looking for.) Minecraft is one of the most interesting distillations and extensions of the modding community, and was built from the ground up as a game that was intended to be modded and put to whatever uses the community could think to use with those blocks (and the programming behind it). There's a reason that it's outsold Tetris to take the number one spot for games, even though it's much more of a toolkit to develop your own things rather than a game to play.

But much like the physical block kits of yesteryear, there's a certain amount of satisfaction that comes from putting together a creation of your very own and being able to display it to the world, so I doubt that we'll be seeing the last of games of this nature for a very long time. And, unless companies get short-sighted about how their products are used, we won't see the end of the community that makes modifications to the game. Including the ones that make mods to restore cut content or to allow the player to cheat and experience they game in the way they want to.

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]

Genres in games are much like genres in other media forms, at least as much as they are not really hard lines that are impenetrable, and at most, they describe a loose confederation of conventions that a game might draw from to explain what a player can expect in the game set before them. In that sense, they function much more like tags than like categories.

Permit me a diversion where I flex one of the few things that a library degree is directly good for (and that I did learn in library school through paying attention), and not just a certain set of orthopraxy that allows us to go with whatever is presented and produce something useful from incomplete and sometimes contradictory information. So, classification schemes, like the Nippon Decimal Classification, the Library of Congress's Medical Subject Headings, or the Linnean classification of the creatures of the planet humans call Terra, work on taxonomy, the idea that things can be separated into distinct categories based on the presence, absence, or particular configuration of attributes of the taxonomy. To stick with creature classification, one of the boundary lines drawn is the presence or absence of vertebrae as part of the structure that holds a creature together. Another is the presence or absence of an exoskeleton for structure. And so one, and so on, until the differences between species are often very small, indeed.

A taxonomic classification also insists there is one best place for any given individual item, even if it is the kind of item that might do well being in more than one place. Books about, say, the Movement for Black Lives have many potential places where they could go, and in a library with infinite shelf space and infinite resources, copies of that book might appear in all of the places it might possibly come from. In a taxonomic classification, however, and because we are libraries with limited budgets and space, the "best" place to go is where the object fits most strongly in the classification, and where it will be around objects that share the most attributes that it has. This sometimes means that books that are about the same subject, such as the Movement for Black Lives, will end up in different places around the library, depending on whether the book is a biography of one of the founders of the movement, whether it is about the movement's goals in general, or whether it is about a thing that affects Black people more strongly and that the Movement is invested in either encouraging or stomping out completely. With the advent of networked computer systems as the primary method of accessing a catalog of objects and new schema that are meant to draw out the relationships between objects as a primary method of navigating and understanding them, catalogs are able to provide more robust and numerous methods of getting to a resource based on a query. The classification doesn't change, specifically, but the number of references increases exponentially when the work of providing them is essentially "add a line in the correct field linking this node to this other node." This allows the catalog to be a more complete abstraction of the works and their contents contained within. With card catalogs, where each reference and node had to be crafted by hand and then added, there were physical limitations of how many cards would fit in the catalog, and so some relationships that were not primary or not very strong, even though they were relevant, were not present.

The other thing a taxonomy demands is a controlled vocabulary. Since the goal of a taxonomy is to divide things into discrete categories, for a taxonomy to be successful, words have to mean very specific things (which cannot be confused with other things). There is only one category of bugs in Linnean classification, Hemiptera. While bugs are arthropods, not all arthropods are bugs. Lepidopeterans are not bugs, and neither are arachnids. A controlled vocabulary is not immune to changes, additions, or subtractions, but it often has to go through An Entire Process to have things shifted, added, or deleted from the record. (Which causes a certain amount of consternation when in the Library of Congress Classification's subject headings, there exist things like "illegal aliens" and other products of times gone by where people of the current age want them, at least, to be reduced to a SEE reference, and ultimately, would like to see them dropped out of the LCSH entirely and to no longer be part of the controlled vocabulary. Or when it takes still too long for the Dewey Decimal Classification to get off its ass and fix the religion classification (200s) so that everything that's not Christians isn't lumped into a single range (290-299.)) Everything in the taxonomy can be described with the controlled vocabulary, and best results for finding all the objects that you are looking for in that classification is to use that controlled vocabulary as much as you can.

This is, of course, entirely artificial and often orthogonal to the way that people actually think and use language. Professionals train in the use of the controlled vocabulary so that they can help guide someone else in their research tasks, or in being as complete as possible for their own research reviews and readings. To expect someone to learn a controlled vocabulary and then come with a query or to go to a search terminal or OPAC and use that controlled vocabulary is unrealistic, to put it mildly. Especially for people who are just looking for something good to read or something that will be informative or they really just want to know some sort of factoid about something. Controlled vocabularies and taxonomies are for researchers, professionals, and people who have already run a few searches and aren't finding the things they're looking for or want to find more on a particular facet or subset of their results. And, sometimes, the taxonomy doesn't actually cover everything that a person might be looking for, or it discards certain important relationships between objects because of the way it sets control and authority on the vocabulary.

To remedy these gaps, we have folksonomy, which does not have a controlled vocabulary, but it often also composed of links and shared ideas hat sometimes transcend the rigid boundaries of the classification system. What people commonly call bugs encompasses several different Linnean classifications. Malware is a supergroup of many different types of malicious program, but if someone says their computer caught a virus, they might mean a worm or some other technical classification of malware that isn't, strictly speaking, a virus. Tagging is the way that folksonomy is most commonly run, where links that are either personal or that highlight something missing from the taxonomy are made. While a taxonomy might have a lot of information available about any given work of art, it might not actually mention the colors of the paints used in the work (unless those pigments are themselves notable). Thus, a person looking through a digital collection that just wants a painting that's primarily red would have a hard time determining whether they have all the paintings possible. But if someone had gone through and tagges each painting with tags representing their primary colors, then, suddenly, someone can choose the tag (or search for red) and has a good chance of collecting them all, so long as each person tags things in relatively the same way. It's useful information to the layperson who is just looking at things, even if it didn't make the official classification scheme.

Some things that appear repeatedly in a folksonomy might be imported into the controlled vocabulary, and might even become part of the taxonomy. For a current and large-scale example of folksonomy eventually becoming taxonomy, watch the tag wrangling and syn(onym)ing that happens in the tag cloud of the Archive of Our Own. As new tags come in, sometimes things are described differently depending on the writer. Eventually, a certain set of tags come through that are all representative of the same relationship or concept. One of those tags has to be selected to become the official taxonomic controlled vocabulary term. All other terms that are related to that one then end up as synonyms, see-alsos, and otherwise set up in such a way that using those terms will ilnk back to the canonical term in use and display all works that have that canonical term or any of the other terms that have been synonym-linked to it. As new tags come in from other places and as people express themselves in the multitudes that they can, those tags are evaluated to see whether they should also be added to the canonical tags or should be spun into a canonical tag of their own. I suspect that only certain tags that cross a threshold of usage end up under consideration for inclusion in the taxonomy, so as not to overwhelm the volunteers that do the tag wrangling, but it's a masterful example of building a taxonomy by mining the folksonomy already in place and being created and expanded on a regular basis. Taxonomy and folksonomy don't have to compete with each other, as they fill different niches. Although, there's always the possibility that the folksonomy will get overwhelmed and become useless if certain tags are overused or otherwise just return everything. Much like keyword searching on the Internet, both taxonomy and folksonomy should return useful, or at least interesting, results when they are used to traverse and discover relationships between objects.

There, now that I've spent about 1700 words explaining what taxonomies and folksonomies are, how does this apply to games? Well, in the beginning, there was a thought that game genres could be more taxonomic, so that you could find your niche (and marketing category) easily and be content buying and playing games from that particular group, and marketers could figure out where their audiences were and who were the right groups to market particular games to. The ideal space would be that a person looked at the box art, the title, and the genre, and would have a particular idea of what a game consisted of, and a good chance to figure out whether or not they would like it. As with every other attempt to make genre into a taxonomy, it crashed and burned, because once you start trying to define strong boundaries and categorizations and put people into lanes, there will inevitably end up being edge cases. And things that don't fit nicely into a single genre or taxonomic spot. And things that are created to deliberately mess with the genre boundaries. Or things created specifically to take the tropes of any given genre and turn them against a Genre Savvy player and force them to play a completely different game than the one they thought they were getting (looking at you, Undertale, as a pretty prominent example of the last one.) You do a little bit better classifying games according to things like their prevalent tropes, storytelling quirks, and mechanics (for which the obligatory mention is that TVTropes Will Ruin Your Life even as it gives you a vocabulary to be better able to describe the experiences you are having and the mechanics that you are seeing. This is decidedly folksonomic, even as TVTropes works on taking the folksonomy and transforming it into a taxonomy (for their own wiki, anyway) once enough examples of any given concept exist to start their own wiki page after it goes through the process of You Know That Thing Where… I freely use the TVTropes controlled vocabulary because I find it useful and descriptive, even in just trope names, but you could use other things to describe games and their devices. Steam has an entire tag cloud put together, and while their tags are more taxonomic than folksonomic, they don't necessarily try to control the game tags in such a way as to make taxonomic classifications about the game, but instead display things like "people who have played this game / looked at this game use these tags most frequently." Which is meant as another piece of information in addition to the video and screenshot previews of the game as well as the description of the game as provided by the developer. People tend to tag reasonably well about all of these things, including things like the presence or absence of 18+-type situations and possible content as well as what general mechanics or style someone might get by playing the game.

So we have a richly developed classification and description system in place, but even then, we still have genre markers as supergroups of what kind of things to expect out of a game. "Fighting" games generally work in 1v1 situations, where each character has a specific roster of possible moves and defenses to choose from, some of which work very well and others which don't against the other characters in the roster. This makes them distinct from "Brawler" games, which tend toward multiple combatants all at once in an arena that may or may not have hazards, weapons, or other features that also have to be contended with, in addition to all the other fighters. These are distinct, however, from "beat-em-ups," which are usually anywhere from one to four player characters against waves and hordes of less-powerful mooks, each of which must be defeated in their entirety before the characters are allowed to progress to the next stage (and sometimes the player characters are on a clock for each wave that will punish them for taking too long to defeat their opponents), culminating in boss battles against more powerful characters at the end of each stage, who usually require different fighting approaches and strategies compared to the opponents faced in the stage. All of these types of games, while they contain action, are usually different than "action" games, which tend to be the supergroup of things like first-person shooters, "shoot-em-ups" like Metal Slug and "danmaku" (bullet hell) games, where the focus is on often simple-seeming gameplay (sometimes overlaid on top of a very complex system for point scoring and gathering bonuses that are essential to survival) that often emulate the loops of arcade machines (and often, their tendency to start at punishing difficulty and get worse).

Then, somewhere over elsewhere, we have the role playing games, where someone can usually expect a tabletop-like mechanical system that rewards players with experience points and level progressions that improve their statistics, where finding and equipping good gear is important to keeping up with the increasing difficulty of enemies, some system of generating magic or magic-like effects, and things like random encounters, side quests, and optional bonus bosses that sometimes require the exploitation of a particular overlooked mechanic (such as utilizing the Standard Status Effects when every other battle in the game can be easily defeated without them) or that require specific actions in sequence so as to achieve a desired result (Chrono Cross is one that comes to mind, where not only does realizing that there's useful information on the screen and in the sound take some thinking, but finding the item needed to actually achieve the good ending means having to know where it is and go to that space, because it doesn't signal its presence on the map like the other places do). Except Undertale also describes itself as a role-playing game, and it is, except that everything that's seen as a standard feature to the genre supergroup is anathema to getting the good ending in Undertale, and instead, to do well at Undertale, you have to play bullet hell and other types of games instead. Or you can play Undertale like a genre-standard RPG and end up with the Bad Ending instead.

And those old friends of ours, "casual" and "hardcore", sometimes show up in the tags as well, although they're usually meant as a barometer of how much the game will teach you before it tosses you into the gameplay experience, how much time you will be expected to invest in the game before you understand it well enough to attempt to play it well, or how much it will help (or mock) you if you're clearly having difficulties with the gameplay and its requirements.

As with any genre form, you get more comfortable with the conventions and expectations of it the more you interact with it, which is why it's often useful to have a good game that's an example of the form and its tropes handy if someone asks about whether they would enjoy a particular genre or not. And a few other recommendations for people who like the genre, except for that one mechanic that seems to be everywhere that they find more stressful than enjoyable. In a lot of ways, being good at reading the tags and recommending the games and figuring out whether any particular offering is going to be something you really enjoy playing and which are things that you might get a quick thrill out of, but then will get bored with swiftly or ragequit over, is a matter of time, finesse, and practice. And playing a few exemplar games in each genre to get a feel for what it does and doesn't do. Assuming you have the money for that, or more likely, the friends (or YouTube streamers) that can do it or play it while you watch. Those with librarian training (or the ability to think and elicit information from people like a librarian) will find it easier to classify, engage with the taxonomies and folksonomies, and otherwise break apart games into the important components so as to make good recommendations. (Which actually goes for any media elements you consume, be it canon, fic, art, audio, video, or games.)

Tell me about your favorite games and why you like them. Or ask for recommendations. Or suggest topics for future entries. We've still got a week's worth of entries left before the end of the month.

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]

So we've talked a little bit about shareware and the episodic releases they have, where you got to play one quarter, one third, or some other significant part of the complete game, even though that part of the game might have certain amounts of enemies, weapons, or items withheld as an enticement to get someone to buy the full game and experience but only the full amount of content, but also the rest of the story started by the first episode, usually ending on a hook of some sort, whether it's the Doom Guy dying and going to Hell, or Commander Keen discovering a space base where his rival might be, and so forth. Shareware works on the assumption that getting a portion of the story is enough for someone to want to buy the rest of it.

Pokémon, on the other hand, works on the principle that you and a friend both want to buy the same game that only has a few differences between it, and you will both be satisfied playing the game with and against each other.

While Pokémon is an older (and extremely successful) franchise, there are always people coming to it new as they get old enough to choose their own starter, so here's a quick primer. Generally, the Pokémon core games start with a small child coming of age and being tasked with a research quest by the local Pokémon Professor to go out with a Pokédex, an encyclopedia, and gather as much data as is possible on the species of Pokémon around them. What are Pokémon? They're the local wildlife in the games, and there are special high-tech objects called Pokéballs that can be used to capture them if they are sufficiently weakened first. Weakening Pokémon sufficiently to capture them usually involves battling with Pokémon already friendly to the Trainer character, so in addition to the Pokédex, the player chooses their first Pokémon from a set of three made available by the Pokémon Professor. (In specific special editions, like Pokémon Yellow or Let's Go Eevee!/Pikachu!, the starter Pokémon is already selected and usually has a significantly greater amount of flexibility of moves and powers than a wild-caught Pokémon of the same species. The disadvantage to this is that the Pokémon selected will not evolve in any way, so some of the wild-caught species will still be necessary to collect.) Traditionally, the three starter Pokémon are a choice between Grass-element, Water-Element, and Fire-element. Elements in Pokémon work in a method of rock-paper-scissors, where certain elements are strong (to the point of negation) against others, while weak against yet other elements' moves. There are eighteen active types in the current generation of Pokémon, so anyone wanting to be extremely effective at the game has to be able to play RPS-18 with some extra hitches, as sometimes there's more than one weakness to be exploited or more than one strength to be utilized (dual-type Pokémon) and several different ways to achieve maximum damage when desired. For starter Pokémon, Grass moves are super-effective against water, Water moves are super-effective against Fire, and Fire moves are super-effective against Grass. This expands greatly as the new types come into existence.

While the Pokémon Professor offers the goal of collecting data on all of the Pokémon speies that are native to the reason, the player character also has an additional goal that will propel them through the narrative. In several of the towns in the region are Pokémon battling gyms, headed by a single Leader for that gym. Gyms generally focus on specific elements and task the player with building a team that can suitably take advantage of the type system to defeat the Gym Leader. Defeating the Gym Leader awards the player character a badge, which generally raises the level limit of Pokémon that can be safely traded. (Pokémon above that limit will refuse to listen to the trainer's directions, either acting randomly or refusing to act at all, which is how the game prevents a newcomer from getting traded a whole bunch of super-powerful Pokémon to steamroll through the game with.) After defeating all Gym Leaders for their region (usually eight), the trainer character then battles the Elite in the Pokémon Championship for that region (usually four). The Elite trainers are still usually single-type, but they use rarer types that are not as easily matched against, such as Ice or Dragon.

Also common in Pokémon games is the Rival, a child of the same age as the protagonist who is also given the same task of learning as much as possible about the Pokémon around them. They will choose their starter Pokémon to have type-advantage against the player character's starter, such that if battles come down to the starters, the Rival will have the upper hand. The Rival is almost always one step ahead of the player character, in terms of leveling and training their Pokémon, but the player character tends to end up doing more during their journey than the Rival does. At the end of the training climb that goes through the Gyms and the Elites, the player character usually has to battle the Rival as a Final Exam Boss before they can truly claim the championship and win that portion of the game.

In addition to the Rival, the player character's journey is often made more complicated through their tangles with a crime syndicate with plans for the region the character is currently in. The player character either accidentally or deliberately infiltrates, sabotages, and otherwise foils the plans of the villains through their superior Pokémon training and battling skills, obtaining useful items and ways of getting through barriers that had previously blocked their path.

All in all, the formula is the same, with new generations of Pokémon introduced generally when a new Nintendo handheld console comes out and then a few years afterward, if there hasn't been one yet. Starting with the original Game Boy in 1996, there have been eight generations of Pokémon introduced so far, bringing the full total to more than 850 things to be caught across all the games. And while each game has the goal of winning the Pokémon League of their particular region, the game itself appeals to the completionist with the idea of catching all the Pokémon to complete the Dex for that game. There's just one tiny thing standing in the way of that, though: Not all the Pokémon of any given region are available in one game. Right from the beginning, with Red / Green (and then Blue / Yellow as the upgrades and special versions), Pokémon has always released in pairs, both of which have generally the same story, but have some differences between them in terms of what they have available for collectors, and, in the later versions, which Legendary Pokémon will be available for the player character to attempt to capture. To actually catch 'em all, a player has to have other people playing the game, or another device that can run another copy of the game and trade its uniques to the player. A full Dex requires not only all the Pokémon unique to the other game, but it usually also involves having to get someone to trade you one of their starter Pokémon at their earliest evolution stage. So if someone is just starting out and will trash their game as soon as they trade it away, a player can get a full Pokédex, which means that they should theoretically have something to trade in return. Some Pokémon only evolve (and thus fill a spot in the Dex) by being traded away to someone else. There are other reasons to trade as well (any Pokémon that's been traded gains boosted amounts of experience points, making it faster for them to level up, and trading often re-randomizes the hidden values of a Pokémon, meaning that what was pretty useless to the trainer that caught it can become a juggernaut for the one receiving it in a trade.) Pokémon can also be used in Trainer Battles between friends, for those looking to be the strongest of their friend groups or to play among each other.

So, Pokémon is unavoidably a game that you have to play with friends (who have different versions) to get full value. When it initially debuted, it also showcased an important new technology for the time, the link cable that allowed two different Game Boys to transfer data and engage in battles with each other. Link Cables continued to exist all the way through the handhelds that didn't get a wireless communication chip in them, at which point trading Pokémon became possible with anyone who also had a copy of the game. Suddenly, filling out that Dex becomes a lot easier when you can tap the entirety of the player base, and not just whomever happens to be nearby and has Pokémon to trade. (This became even more ubiquitous with the release of Pokémon Go, the smartphone game, but there's still the problem that some Pokémon only appear in certain regions of the globe, forcing you to either have someone in that area that can trade you their mons or for you to become a globetrotter (or GPS spoofer) to fully collect them all, much to the consternation of completionists.) Battling is also best done among friends, as the combat system is remarkably complex and requires all of that 18-type chart to be in play at any given time. The best Pokémon battlers can remember and change their Pokémon to get best advantage at a moment's notice. But players don't have to battle their friends, they can just be trading each other or trying to complete their Dexes, and that's a legitimate goal as well. And since they're all kids at the right age, and no Pokémon ever dies from battle, just faints and needs to be revived, and the kids get to beat on a crime syndicate, there's a lot of love about Pokémon. It's another one of those games that shouldn't work, if you hear the concept behind it, but Game Freak produced a gem of a game to go along with the concepts, and so the series has been going strong for 20+ years and eight generations of monsters. And then gets people to buy the remakes made for newer systems so they can re-catch what they had before, but bring them forward into the new game and its scenarios. The franchise still makes a lot of money, not just from the games, but from all the tie-ins and spinoffs, so it's going to be around for a while still.

It's super-effective!

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]

The media consumption environment of our current days has more programming than even Adrian Veidt could keep up with (assuming he wanted to watch everything, instead of having a carefully and rigorously curated list of things). Between books, shows, games, podcasts, music, drama, and plenty of other things, the average person will only get a fraction of the total amount of media available for consumption, even if they resolutely try only to consume media produced in the current year.

The interactivity of games poses a special problem, however. In many cases, significant parts of the story of any given game might be hidden behind whether or not a person explores out-of-the-way areas or completes challenging missions work good ratings, or quickly, or sometimes, acts entirely counterintuitively to the story as laid out and opens up a pathway where they discover the real narrative that has been hidden behind the original story. Sometimes these hidden pathways are signposted or hinted at, and other times, they are entirely a Guide Dang It, where these pathways are discovered entirely by accident, by someone trying to chart every single result for any given decision point, or when the official guidebook or walkthrough mentions their existence. (For example, one secret part of Batman: Arkham Asylum went undiscovered until the developers themselves mentioned its existence.)

Which is to say that sometimes, getting to the golden ending takes more skill than a person has or time that a person wants to invest in a particular game, and so they are locked out of that content unless they have someone who is willing to put in the time or has the necessary skills to achieve the conditions put forward for unlocking that bit. Visual novels are generally the best about making it possible for someone to get to the point where they want to make a different decision quickly, or to be able to back up from a decision that resulted in a bad ending and to take another pathway. Although sometimes they don't make it obvious where the real decision point has been made, which can lead to frustration over not being able to avert a disaster, when the truth was that you already had to know all the items to take from Arthur's bedroom and get all of them at the beginning of the game (or the part where you replay the beginning of the game in the middle of the game) or that you had to feed a dog a sandwich to avoid getting eaten later on. Thankfully, at least for main stories, not providing roadmaps for your players so that they know when things are going to go poorly or so that they know which thing is the action they're supposed to do is considered bad game design. I personally also think it bad game design to lock your content behind skill gates where the player is expected to perform several advanced moves in sequence and perfect timing to get access to this achievement or cutscene. Games like Kaizo Mario or I Wanna Be The Guy always seemed much more like exercises in frustration with the payoff of one perfect run that means you can go on to the next frustration task rather than something I actually would enjoy playing.

Thankfully, with the wider world of connected networks, and the ease in which someone can capture their screen, and also an audio stream or a camera and microphone attached to themselves, it's now possible for a game to be experienced much more like a movie, or a movie with commentary from the player of the game. The Let's Play name is often applied to these cinematic walkthroughs, whether by screenshot or screencast, even though it's an audience watching someone else play the game. But vicarious experiences are not new, and I would be a flagrant hypocrite (and not very good at English grammar) if I were to harsh on the enjoyment of others who feel satisfied and like they have achieved something good through viewing a thing, rather than directly doing it themselves.

Let's Plays exist for a lot of games, and more than a few people have garnered a large subscriber base by having an engaging, hilarious, or sometimes full of swear words experience, which can then be monetized through advertisements, patronage, merchandise, or other methods by either the person doing the gaming or by companies that claim copyright over the content in use. Recording gameplay and streaming it (or using that recorded gameplay to build a walkthrough, a Let's Play, or an entirely new series and narrative divorced from the story of the game itself made possible through a bug in the game where characters could lower their weapon so it no longer appeared in the viewport of the viewpoint character) is far easier now than it was before. Games have had replay features, often where you could save a match or a run to the console and replay it in the game itself for a long time, but it was pretty difficult to export that match data to a file format that could then be edited and uploaded. Emulation made this task much treasurer on any system that could be emulated, whether for screenshots or for recording video from inside the emulator or have a video card recording screen activity that then became raw footage to work with. The newest Sony console as of the writing, the Playstation 4, has a recording feature built in and turned on so as to make it exceedingly easy to stream or connect gameplay footage for editing and broadcast. And, apparently, as Kingdom Hearts III taught me, it is possible for games to say which parts of their experience should be forbidden from recording. Not that those parts didn't also work their way onto the Internet swiftly and get themselves edited into compilations of the game to be watched, but the console itself said that it could not be recorded. (The console also takes screenshots of when achievements are recorded, which is a slight bit of hilarity for Kingdom Hearts, as a lot of their achievements and things are awarded in between scenes or after the screen fades to white, so the screenshots that go with the achievements are mostly either a black screen or a white one.) Many relatively recent video cards also come with a software overlay to begin recording gameplay sessions at the touch of a button. Clearly, sharing gameplay sessions and putting together all of the cutscenes and narrative of a game, movie-style, or putting together a complete game session, start to finish, is definitely going to be with us for a while, assuming that companies don't suddenly decide they want absolutely zero footage of their games out there, or worse, they start selectively enforcing their copyright to remove portrayals of the game they don't like. And since the mere accusation is enough to generate a strike against an account, the DMCA can be used very easily to silence dissenting voices, because nobody is able to afford the cost of going through the the court case that would say "no, hey, gameplay footage for purposes of criticism is entirely a fair use of the footage."

And Let's Plays are enough in the cultural memory at this point that Toby Fox's role-playing game Undertale makes mention of the phenomenon in a fourth-wall break during one particular set of choices in the game.

"At least we're better than those sickos that stand around and WATCH it happen... Those pathetic people that want to see it, but are too weak to do it themselves. I bet someone like that's watching right now, aren't they...?"

Without a culture already established that likes to watch video games get played by others, and, indeed, might enjoy watching video games getting played by others where they take cruel choices because they are curious to see how it changes the story or what kind of bad ends it results in, this piece doesn't land quite as well as it would otherwise.

I've watched a Let's Play or two, and read ones that are full of commentary, and it's a different form than the straight walkthrough, where the idea is to get someone through the game with as complete or perfect a game as possible and give them the information they'll need to be successful. In the Let's Play form, while someone is going through the game, and often is doing so with the intention of getting a particular ending, half the fun is in the commentary going on and the possibilities of making or getting jokes. And, sometimes, it's the game itself that's taking the brunt of being made fun of, instead of, say, a protagonist that never says anything or that can't defend themselves in any way against malevolent spirits unless they take a picture of them and apparently transfer some of the essence of the ghost onto film. Which is also a game that encourages you to let the ghost get as close as possible to hurting the protagonist before taking the shot so as to do maximum damage with the camera's power.

I'll probably indulge in a few Let's Plays if I ever get truly curious about horror games or twitchy games or otherwise games that I would have no intention of playing at all, just to see about their cultural relevance or to get caught up on the memes. For the games I'm interested in, though, I'm probably going to try and play them through as much as I can.

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]

As a genre, starting with games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, the 2D and 3D fighting game space generally caters towards an audience that wants complexity of systems and a certain amount of game and metagame combination that makes adaptability and flexibility important things to add on top of complete memorization of the moveset available to a character and strategies for defeating other characters and playstyles. Players intend to build something akin to an invincible style that cannot be defeated by any other player, so long as their execution is correct, but the game is usually balanced in such a way that some characters will have movesets well-designed to defeat other characters, and that no playstyle becomes truly unbeatable. You can see this in the "tier" rankings of characters in fighting games, as the competitive and "hardcore" kind of audience determines which characters are best suited to the game they want to play. It usually involves calculations around speed, reach, power, and deception, as a significant part of playing the game is in getting your opponent to believe you are performing one strategy only to engage in one quite different, and also in reading your opponent correctly and countering their moves. Characters that use ambiguous or similar motions for different moves are praised for their ability to confuse opponents and allow for combo attacks if the first one lands. Characters that can also interrupt their own moves or cancel them into other moves if it looks like a combo is going to fail or be blocked are also prized.

Given that I really don't understand input delays, buffering moves, and how you're supposed to be able to perform difficult combinations from memory contextually, and much of the mechanics of how a game works at the competitive level, I mostly enjoy these games by myself, often in the mode where I can gain a certain amount of overpowering ability and thus not actually have to care that much about finesse technique to achieve my aims. In short, I'm terrible at these games and keep myself well away from the hypercompetitive community as much as possible, for everyone's sake.

And then came a game that, for all rights and purposes, shouldn't have worked at all. A mascot fighter between characters from various Nintendo franchises, set on stages from those same franchises, some of which have hazards of gimmicks that make battling on them more difficult than usual. And with objects from those franchises that can be picked up and used as part of the battle. And the moveset for each character is limited to normal attacks, special attacks, shielding/evading, and grapples/throws. And none of them require knowing sophisticated joystick movement to pull off. Instead, the normal attacks work on the principle of whether the joystick is not moving when the button is pressed, whether the joystick is tilted in a direction and a button pressed, or whether the joystick has been smashed in a direction and the button pushed (and held, as these moves are chargeable) Special attacks depend entirely on whether the joystick is pointed in a particular direction or not when the button is pressed. And the shield button shields unless the joystick is smashed in a direction, then the character performs a dodge. It's a reasonably simple, learnable system and it's using Nintendo characters. Presumably, the "hardcore" crowd would hate it. But they didn't hate Super Smash Brothers at all once they discovered there was an interesting system underneath its apparent simplicity.

Smash 64 was limited by the system itself, coming out near the end of the lifetime of the Nintendo 64. I played a pretty significant amount of it (poorly) in university, because dorm-mates and friends catty-corner played. And then played a significant amount of other fighters (very poorly), like Capcom vs. SNK 2 and Guilty Gear XX on Dreamcast, where it became pretty apparent that my play style, such that it is, is pretty predictable and involves a lot of mashing buttons instead of executing combinations. It meant that I was Berzerker, probably as much for the continual negative self-talk as much as it was for the playing style.

Smash matured pretty significantly for the GameCube offering, Melee. And was a lot faster than 64 has been, thanks to better graphics and a more powerful processor under the hood. For most of the competitive circuit, Melee was the perfect game and all others are inferior copies. Of course, they're playing it on their specific way when they say that. I had a blast with Melee playing all the other modes and ways of playing the game, because I like having lots of chaos and stage hazards to throw around and deal with as things go on. It makes the game feel fairer, in that someone who can demolish me with their "skill" often takes a Donkey Kong hammer to the face or gets caught between me and my Pokémon and takes a significant amount of damage and launch.

Ah, right, should mention that success in Smash Brothers isn't usually about inflicting enough damage that your opponent collapses in a knockout. You can play it that way (Stamina mode), but damage accumulation is only the first part of Smash victory. The actual way to win is to knock your opponents off the stage. The more damage they have accumulated, the easier it is to send them flying with a good attack, but pure damage itself is not an indicator of victory.

Melee also improved upon the single-player experience by engaging with Adventure mode, a series of stages where ones chosen character has to both navigate the stage and engage in various fights with other characters along the way. There were bonus games, like the home run contest, trying to figure out who had the power to send a sandbag flying after damaging it significantly, or target tests to help someone get familiar with all the ways a character could move and strike, or some trophy drops, and the mission mode that imposed other conditions on the battle (and, most memorably, ended with a battle of you against Mewtwo, Giga Bowser, and Giant Ganondorf at the most difficult AI level. There was a lot of cheese employed to get that particular victory.)

Smash was also replayable in a lot of ways through the Special Smash modes, where everyone could be turned invisible, made tiny, made huge, have a lot of starting damage, permanently accumulate damage over time, and so forth. If the regular game wasn't interesting enough, there were modifiers that could be engaged to make things even more fun. Or weird. While Melee only had specific modes, from Brawl on, individual modifiers could be turned on or off so as to allow for a customized Smash experience. Most other fighting games didn't have this kind of replay value, or they had other modes that were wrapping story between various fight sequences. And while the people around me mostly treated these extra modes as novelties or things to be avoided, I thought of them as ways to avoid boredom if you were playing only with the same group of people (or by yourself) and wanted something different to do.

After Melee had become the darling of the competitive scene (which, in turn, spawned "Fox Only, No Items, Final Destination" as the perceived pinnacle of perfection for competitive play), Brawl, for the Wii, took a beating from the competitive scene because it rebalanced things, took away the exploits that were considered absolutely essential to high-level play, and reminded all of the competitive players that fundamentally, Smash is a game that's meant to be played between people who are having fun and that a certain amount of randomness to the game (implemented by a function in every mode where a character might randomly trip and fall instead of performing certain actions like running) was going to be enforced so that games wouldn't necessarily be decided only by "skill", even if if most of them would be. Project M was created to reverse most of those changes and bring back the gameplay desired by the competitive scene, so we know how the demand to start having fun again went over.

And since I'm a scrub, of course, I liked the changes brought on in Brawl. The speed of battle slowed down significantly (unlike many game series, and especially the Marvel vs. Capcom series, where later entries in the series tend to speed things up), making it easier for me to follow the flow of action and react accordingly. And there were new characters, and a new single-player mode called The Subspace Emissary, where someone could unlock basically all of the characters in the game by playing the single-player mode all the way through (and then finishing the three bonus battles after the end), instead of unlocking each character after a set number of battles and then defeating them one-on-one, which was the usual way of doing it in Melee. Smash is very good about providing multiple ways of achieving unlocks of playable characters, and none of them are hidden behind "do this nearly impossible task on the hardest difficulty." They're not as good at avoiding hiding trophies or other achievements behind impossible tasks, but they don't restrict characters, at least.

Smash 4 for Wii U took out tripping, and didn't have a single-player mode as such, based on feedback that apparently people didn't like or play Subspace Emissary, which is surprising to me, but it was a solid serviceable game with lots of characters to play with, adding yet more canon imports into the games from their own universes. (Sonic and Solid Snake came in Brawl, Mega Man and Pac-Man in Smash for Wii U, and Cloud, Ryu, and Ken arrived in Ultimate. There are other characters available through DLC, but I'm not including them.) Since the Wii U itself was a very short-lived console, I didn't get as much experience with Smash 4 as I would have otherwise. And it's single-player options included challenge modes, like the missions from Melee, but that was about it. Nothing spectacular, but a lot of it good.

And then Ultimate released with the Switch, and the cast list for it is gargantuan, the game has been tuned and tweaked, lots of options are available, and there's a single-player story again, as well as Spirits to include as many game franchises as possible and provide new ways of playing and experiencing the game, in the single-player and the multiple-player mode. It's still the case that many of these improvements and features are ignored, but the people doing so are happy because they can quickly access stages that play either like the Battlefield or the Final Destination stages, even if they're visually distinct, and they can configure their default rules to their favorite forum of play. And all the rest of us can do the same, and save our own rules, so we don't have to fight with each other about where the rules are set. Smash Ultimate really does a good job of being a game that is about having fun and also letting the people who are going to be ultracompetitive about it set up their own sandbox to play in, apart from the rest of us who want to have a lot of fun with all the rest of the game.

While I'm not great at other games, Smash Brothers had always been deliberately designed to be accessible enough that I can feel like I'm doing well and putting on the cool moves without having to need frame prefect inputs on everything. And playing with the items on is really good and adds dimension to the fighting game that I can take advantage of and plan with. I'm still going to lose (a lot), because a significant amount of the people I play with disdain the idea of items or want to play without them or the stages that have been lovingly crafted to be interesting challenges to navigate on their own, but instead of it being "this is all the game is, and you're clearly pretty bad at it, so why bother to continue playing when it's not going to be fun?", I can know that they're limiting themselves to only a small portion of the game that is available for them, and that while I may only be middling-skill in their favored play space, I can be quite good when they're playing in mine.

Smash is the game that shouldn't work, if you play by the "hardcore" group's interpretation of what is good. But it is good, and it manages to be good for me as well as for them, and that's really hard to pull off.

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]

So we left yesterday's post at a time of great flux, as physical stores are closing, entire names that have been regulars in mall spaces and other places are gone, replaced by bigger conglomerates that sell the same things everywhere. It'll be a little bit before retro nostalgia really kicks in with a vengeance and we start seeing used game stores popping up in those same places to sell new systems that can read old cartridges and play those games, while also offering those same cartridges and sometimes, the rare variations of older systems themselves, for sale. They often have accessories as well, and the ones that aren't necessarily chain-based stores also sell arcade cabinets or offer tournaments and play spaces for old games and new.

As physical spaces to sell games (and other goods and media, really) are declining, the World Wide Web is taking off. So much so that it's starting to be affordable (for certain values of) for a person to get broadband Web access thorough the same provider that gives them pay television access. Technology is improving to the point where a person can have a theater-quality experience with high-end televisions and sound systems, and indeed, many game consoles are also movie playing devices. (The project now known as Kodi started as XBMC - XBox Media Center, transforming the Microsoft console into a full-fledged media center that could do much more than just play games.) This is a bit of an enticement to get a game console, at least for me, because then I get to both play games and use the console as a media center of sorts, so long as the console ends up being able to use the winning format in the format war.

This is also the point in time where games really start trying to be cinematic in their presentation. Games that used Full Motion Video aren't new (Night Trap, after all, was filmed in 1987, even if it didn't release until 1992), but they are a limited technology for interactivity, in that the player jumps around from place to place, playing pre-recorded clips based on when the player chose to interact during the clip. The technology that went into making those games (and the big boom of FMV games that happened through the early 1990s) isn't actually all that limited, either, given that chroma key techniques are already in use by this point, and motion capture technology is able to take the inputs of martial artists, like Carlos and Daniel Pesina, and digitize them so that your favorite pallette-swap ninja (or other character) for Mortal Kombat comes through crisply. Of course, all of these techniques rely on actual humans doing the motions, which often requires stunt work and chroma-key work. Technology, at this point, is switching over to the idea of filming actors using motion capture technology and then match moving the performance into the desired environment, which has usually been built completely digitally. (Or, in the case of many theatrical films and television shows, match moving them back into a filmed environment where stand-ins or actors are filmed for the non-effects characters to look at. Which itself might also have chroma-key backgrounds.) With more powerful processors and video units, as well as sharp jumps in the amount of available storage on both disc and disk media, the additional computing resources needed to make a cinematic, sweeoing experience full of motion, rather than characters walking across painted backgrounds, are finally on consoles and computers. (By which I mean PCs one might buy in an electronics or warehouse store, not customized, ground-up built gaming rigs specifically meant to have fast CPUs, large amounts of video memory and powerful GPUs, an abundance of hard disk space and RAM, and possibly an aftermarket cooling system designed so that the processor and all of its components can be run at a faster clock speed than the processor itself is rated for or sold at.) To see how far things have come since the FMV era, one only needs look at gameplay from Final Fantasy VII's original Playstation release (you can see the characters in all their polygonal glory moving over FMV backgrounds in, say, the opening video to FFVII on the Playstation, which was mostly the same on the PC release) compared to how the characters move and play in the Remake that will be arriving in 2020 (a boss fight, in all its glory, as an example here, including the use of several Limit Breaks and Summon Materia). There's twenty years of technological improvement at work there, and it shows.

All of this technological improvement, however, comes at the cost of needing space for all of it to go. Before the availability of widespread broadband, games had to generally be pressed to a physical medium, which would mean that some games needed to have a disc change when a certain amount of the game had passed. PCs could often get around this limitation because the data on the disc could be copied to the hard drive, but some games had their audio tracks still on the disc and needed to access those tracks anyway. (It was a weird time between cartridges and DVDs, okay? 700MB wasn't actually all that much, so a four-disc RPG was pretty common at the time.) Once storage media caught up to the requirements, we were back to single discs (and Blu-rays by now can mostly hold games, of the numbers I'm setting to download hold on correctly), but we're also in the timeline where Amazon is proving rapidly that it can apply the techniques it has learned with regard to books to everything else, as well, and has been at the forefront of some new ideas about how people might enjoy having a single device that can hold an entire bookshelf's with of books on it and that holds a charge for a really long time. (Have we mentioned as well that the landline phone market is slowly drying up as mobile phones become small, affordable, and, most importantly, smart?) The Kindle, the iPhone, and Android, combined with the ubiquity of broadband over cable, WiFi, and cell tower, make it feasible for even large games to be downloaded over the Internet, from machine to machine, with no need for a physical anything in the intermediate stage. (It was possible before, but when you're trying to get something that's gigabytes of data over dial-up, you really hope you've got that dedicated second phone line, or you set the download up to happen overnight.)

One of the first players to come on to the scene with a digital distribution method is that same company that Sierra distributed Half-Life hit, Valve. Initially intended, as best I can tell, as a way of buying, downloading, and playing Valve games online, Steam took the next logical step after Doom and Quake provided the infrastructure needed to run the servers for multiplayer games over the Internet as part of the game (whether it was a client computer acting as a server as well or a dedicated server somewhere hosting games all the time) and companies like Blizzard provided official servers to play their games with/against other players on (Battle.net is still the moniker they tend to use for this idea), with temptations and rewards, like ladder servers, for people to stick to official servers instead of setting their own up and configuring them to their liking. On Steam, you could not only play the games and register them and get updates for them, you could buy the games digitally and have them downloaded to your computer. Steam has become a giant platform for many digitally distributed items, not just games, to the point where their sales are legendary events.

At a certain point, other large game publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard decided they didn't want to use Valve's platform for playing and distribution of their games, and so now there's Origin, and the Battle.net launcher, and a Bethesda launcher, and ArenaNet has a launcher, and, and, and. Each company is putting their catalogue on their own service exclusively and banking that there are enough people who will use that and purchase from it for the digital service to be viable. Which is something that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have been doing on their own new consoles for a while now, offering back catalogue across their history through emulation. Some of those games have worked their way across to other platforms, like Steam, through emulation, so it is legally possible to play the Playstation version of a Super Nintendo game through Steam and the DS version on an Android phone because Square-Enix or Sega wants to release those games for different markets. Mostly, though, rather than being able to get your content in a single platform any more, it's become a fragmented media space again, and each place is clamoring for some amount of your time, attention, and money to play the AAA game catalog they have available (or the casual games they own the digital adaptations of).

There's been one really big winner, though, in the digital distribution department. An independent game designer that can muster the entry fee (last I knew, it was $100, which would be donated to charity from Valve) and has a game product can get themselves onto the Steam platform and sell their game for the amount they think it is worth. Since there are no physical media to have to manage, inventory, and get into stores, a game, once in the Steam store, can sell copies of itself for as long as it is listed and the Steam service exists. And because of those same things, it's possible for games to list their prices at less than the $60 that a standard store AAA game would cost, or even the $20 that a "Greatest Hits" re-release usually costs (and often includes updates or what was separate downloadable content released from the original game), making it more attractive for a person to take a chance on a game they might not otherwise have seen or ever known about. Steam also has some wishlist features and had invested pretty heavily into a system to provide recommendations (in the form of a queue) so that someone looking for a game like one they enjoyed they could find more of them. Modulo Steam selling versions of games that would be M-rated and under, even if the actual games themselves are AO-rated (especially in the visual novel genre).

Digital versions of these games, and if games that were popular in yesteryear, are sometimes offered in different stores. GOG, for example, focuses on games of earlier DOS and Windows spaces, with some forays into more modern games, with an entirely optional launcher and manager available. GOG focuses on delivering their games without any digital rights management (DRM) attached, which is great for people who want to be able to take their games with them wherever and however they want. Unfortunately, that limits the available software they can offer to things like "good old games" for the most part. (Here's a preview of tomorrow's post: DRM is evil and most digital goods sales don't actually sell the thing itself, forcing a person to hope that the thing they buy will continue to exist into the future.)

Certain games can also get themselves included in various bundle sites or offers, like the ones offered by Humble Bundle, Indie Royale, GOG, and others. Epic Bundle does a pretty good job of keeping track of what's going on at all the other bundle sites around. Which brings us to the other problem of buying your games in groups - it becomes very easy, very quickly, to have a library greater than your available time to play each of those games to their fullest. Even if Sturgeon's Law applies, unless you like games that finish quickly, for your definition of finishing, there's a good chance you'll run out of time and hard drive space before you run out of games. It can cause a certain amount of decision paralysis to try and choose from 1,000+ games obtained to play in your limited free time. It helps if you can stash certain ones in "nope, never going to play", but, well, right now, I've got 32 games that Stream thinks are "perfect," by which we mean all the achievements that were available have been obtained. Some of those games never had any achievements to start with, of course, and may be more of a comfort to own rather than a thing that needs a specific replay.

As with many things in life and media, it's a mixed blessing when it comes to the new ways of business. People who would never have had a shot at becoming creators and seeing their creations end up making them money are able to make their living on those things through the power of there being enough people that enjoy it that they'll give money (or watch ads) for the content. At the same time, that content is monetized and often locked behind DRM or restrictive licensing agreements by big companies that control the platforms those media elements can be distributed on for the widest audience and reach. There's lucre and convenience and a lot of things going for the widespread adoption of a single platform, and there are also things that are not at all good from a single platform gathering an outsize influence. Interoperability would be the best thing ever, but unfortunately, companies don't actually want to play nice with each other, and so we are scattered across the four winds wishing at some point to be able to have all of our things in one space, even if it is a metapackage that pulls everything together and makes it available under one roof.

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]

It's not a terrifying thing, as such, but it does say something about the progression of computing and its continued miniaturization that you can fit the entirety of the library of software available for video game consoles up to the Playstation or so on a piece of flash memory that will cost you about $20. Maybe you need the $50 version. That's still half as much as the Odyssey cost (if you bought a Magnavox television with it), and one-sixth of the cost of most consoles of this era. As the consoles of those times slowly stop working (as they inevitably do), there is the possibility that those pieces of software, and the games made for the consoles, will similarly stop working. Cultural touchstones for a generation or two would disappear, possibly with the ability to play archived games if you should happen to have a touring console exhibit or something like it available in your space that you wanted to visit and pay the admission for. Or if you have something like the Living Computer Museum and Labs near you, perhaps you can take a trip up every so often and interact with the technology of yesteryear. But even there, sometimes the original technology is failing, like the power supplies, or the parts needed to reconstruct a drive no longer exist and the corporation that made them has long since gone out of business.

Luckily for all of us, so long as someone has the original hardware in a working enough state, or if the systems are documented well enough and that documentation is available, it is sometimes possible to extract all of the necessary data to recreate the operating system of a console or computer, to rebuild and create new peripherals that will work with old machines, or to completely virtualize a system so that it can be run inside a completely different system. Similarly, catridge and disc ROM data can often be read off the chips or discs and stored in a file that can be read by a program built to do just that and recreate the experience of yesteryear using hardware and technology of today's day and age. Put mildly, emulation is fucking awesome and allows for the capture and recreation of a lot of the history of computers and games.

Some emulation hardware is geared toward people who have the original software cartridges, but the machine they played them on no longer functions. This is pretty normal for systems older than the original Playstation, especially for those of us who used things like the Game Genie, where we didn't realize there was additional stress being placed on the machines, such that they would stop working unless the Game Genie was present, first, and then they would stop working at all. Here's the Hyperkin offerings for retro controllers and systems, designed to take the original cartridges and play them as if they were on original hardware. Pretty neat, if you still have your collections of cartridges handy and want to go at it with as close to the original controllers as possible.

Things that aren't strictly emulation, but are also meant to help evoke the muscle memory of previous gameplay sessions thought a similar feel and button placement are offerings from places like 8bitdo, whose controllers might look and play similar to those of yore, but are not actually those things, because that would be infringing. (They also sell adapters such that you can use your more modern controllers in retro system settings, or play retro games with modern controller layouts. Some things turn out to be a lot easier to do when you have more buttons to hand. Some turn out harder, because replicating the paddle analog controller for an Atari 2600 on keyboard or gamepad is difficult.)

For the most part, though, emulation of both hardware and software is done by software these days. For any given system that needs emulation, a software program exists that can boot the system, feed it instructions, and interpret and translate the results of those instructions to the system surrounding the emulated system. Because the emulating system has to set up the entire environment, load in the data, and perform a significant amount of translation work back and forth between the emulated system and the system outside, there's a significant horsepower increase needed for most emulation. The later the system is, the more power is needed to reconstruct the system an run it at an appropriate speed. In addition to that, some systems need to have proprietary components available to use, like the console's BIOS transformed into a computer file. The best kind of emulation is able to take as much advantage of the emulating system's hardware as possible, passing translated instructions coming from the emulated system to the components specifically meant to do those operations and feeding the instructions back in. Consoles have always been computers, of course, although not necessarily general-purpose ones, but each successive generation of console is much more like a general-purpose computer, or a multifunction device, or runs an operating system in conjunction with a computer or mobile device, which might make it easier for their emulation if the chips that are used for processing, video, input, and the like are mostly the same as their computer counterparts. Of course, there are always other complications as well.

As it stands, most systems through the Nintendo Wii have rock-solid emulation available for them, assuming you have a Windows PC with sufficient power behind it, and often multiple choices for emulators, and there are apparently good working efforts for the Playstation 3 and work being done to develop a Wii U emulator as well. That's one generation behind the current set of consoles, which is pretty impressive work for developing emulation of those architectures.

Of course, many people aren't interested in buying or upgrading their PC to the point of having enough processing power to emulate very recent game consoles. (Some people are, of course, because, as one might guess, being able to emulate a system on another system usually means its more reliable when played on that system compared to the original. Especially in the PS3's case, where it was pretty prone to malfunction not that long after its introduction. Or for those people who didn't buy a Wii U when it was available, but may have received games for it on the anticipation that others would, or had, bought the system. Or they're interested in replaying many of their favorites in a DOS environment, which hasn't existed since Windows XP. So you can do things like set up an emulation environment for everything up through the Nintendo 64 on a Raspberry Pi single-board computer), where the Pi will set you back all of $35, or if you get the Pi 3, you can transform it into a Steam remote-play device, or if your Steam PC has an nVidia graphics card, the embedded port of Moonlight Game Streaming (which mimics a protocol nVidia put in place for their SHIELD devices) will work for all forms of Raspberry Pi to stream Steam to another place and allow for control of the game that way. (PS4s have a native streaming application for Windows, and I'll bet XBox is pretty easy to stream to a Windows PC as well.) For people just interested in returning to the games they played when they were younger, on systems that they had when they were younger, but don't work now, emulation is really important. It's not quite perfect, though, as I don't think there's been an emulator for the Sega Genesis that implements the "push the reset button" trick for X-Men. That might have that particular part of the game patched out or otherwise bypassed.

Emulation gets used commercially as well, I suspect. A lot of games that are available on platforms such as Steam now that were initially released for other game consoles are probably the original releases for those consoles (or Updated Re-Releases of the same) that have been wrapped in an emulator that silently runs when the app is launched. And sometimes companies themselves re-release an emulator of their own with a select amount of games, like the emulator that is also an Atari joystick to provide input for the games. Or the miniature versions of the NES, SNES, and Playstation 1 that contain an emulator and a selection of ganmes to play on that same emulator. We hope the increasing use of emulation for commercial purposes means a certain amount of contribution back to the projects that are used, if it's an open-source emulation scheme being used.

There is, of course, one thing that has to be mentioned when talking about emulation, and that is that it's not illegal, as best I can tell, to build a working emulator, so long as there isn't any proprietary materials distributed with said emulator (the distribution of those proprietary materials, of course, would require finding some other sourcing method if you don't have the tools to dump those proprietary bits of code into a blob that the emulator can read), but the distribution of the things that can be played on the emulator is various shades of "nope, not legal at all" to "might be arguably legal if you own the thing already, in its original form, and the system that you owned it for isn't being manufactured or repaired any more." This is why persons who are looking for software to run on their emulators generally have to exercise their Web search skills to find places that have the software and then download the software to their own machines, and they assume all the risk of such actions themselves and possibly running afoul of the copy protection schemes or other things that are put in place to try and detect the presence of emulation or of unauthorized copying.

It's still really cool, however, to see old games brought back in such a way that they can be played in their original form, in something close-ish to their original environment, while that environment was constructed completely on a different platform that it might only know peripherally about.

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]

I enjoy playing games in a wide variety of genres and styles. Even ones that I'm pretty terrible at, like fighting games and first-person shooters. I've played on a lot of the popular consoles (and a couple of obscure ones), and on plenty of different platforms and operating systems. I've been playing video games for almost all of my life. It gives me a small amount of perspective on the industry, trends in gaming, and a lot of opinions about how games market and present themselves, and who they're offending by choosing to present themselves this or that way. To put it mildly, there are a lot of people playing, making, and marketing games that think other people playing the game aren't sufficiently like them to qualify as "real" game-players.

As with other gatekeeping attempts, who is and isn't a "gamer" or who is or isn't "hardcore" gives more insight into the prejudices and biases of the person doing the gatekeeping than illuminates anything about where category lines are drawn. If you play games, you play games, and you get to apply whatever label you think best describes you as you play games.

Some of those labels are pretty toxic, though, so I would exercise caution and do some research to figure out what implications there are for describing yourself that way. For this post, I'm going to focus on the false dichotomy between "casual" and "hardcore" or "serious" game-players, but there's another really big one that I'll get to later on that stems from the same problem: there is way too much toxic masculinity interwoven into the fabric of the culture of people who play video games.

Since video games evolve out of programming culture and tabletop board and miniature games, many of the issues that apply to those spaces also apply to video games, sometimes in new forms, and sometimes in exactly the same form. A regrettable carryover from some of those groups are people who look down on the idea that a game is, at its core, supposed to be fun and enjoyable to the people that want to play it, regardless of whether it is their first time or their fortieth. Whether because of a misdirected belief that people who play games think they have the equivalent skills outside of the game, or an insistence that games should only be played to win, using the most advanced tactics and most powerful characters available (often accompanied by resolutely proclaiming anyone who isn't playing with the same mentality is inferior), for those people (sometimes you can spot them by paying attention to the way they behave in other contexts), there's no fun to be had unless everyone is playing at their most intensely competitive. Also, conveniently, this framework (especially as articulated in the chapter on scrubs linked above) allows a competitive player to dismiss any objections to their style as people being fettered by their own unwritten rules, rather than only being limited by what is possible in the game. Even if what is possible is through the deliberate exploitation of glitches and other unintended behaviors. (Like the wavedash in Super Smash Brothers Melee.)

It should be no surprise to anyone that the genuine concerns about violence and antisocial behavior coming from video games and video game culture are about the interactions players have with other people much more than they are about interactions between the player and characters. There are games that encourage the player to behave poorly towards characters and reward them for it, certainly, and sometimes in a really over-the-top way, but if you listen to the major complaints about game culture, you'll find more issues with people being jerks, either for laughs or because they think it's an appropriate response to call in a false hostage situation or bomb threat to the police over losing a game or a bet. Or about the casual ablism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, racism, transmisia, and other -isms slung about on voice chat or text chat, often played off as "trash talk" or things that aren't sincerely meant as anything other than a thing to get someone off their game when directed at opponents, and something harmless when directed at nominal allies. When called on it, they'll be very quick to dismiss it as someone being over-sensitive, or that they didn't actually mean it, or some other way of disclaiming any liability for their words or actions. However, if someone is approaching the game as a thing to be won, and no tactic or advantage is beyond the pale, assuming it can be done in the game (or as part of a meta game strategy), small wonder that everything else, including behaving decently around other people, gets suborned in favor of winning.

Yes, I'll grouse about fairness, sometimes to a degree where I need to walk off the frustration and where it becomes a problem to the people around me. I would like to be better about that in a way that isn't "you're not allowed to complain about this at all," which was the tactic of certain other people through deploying "you're only happy when you win." The people who aren't happy unless they win are usually the people I've described here, who are taking all the fun out of the game in their attempts to get everyone else to take it so seriously and do it their way. What I usually need is to remember that I'm supposed to be enjoying playing and that it might be prudent to stop or switch if I'm not enjoying it. (However, because of the way it was deployed and weaponized in the past, another person making the suggestion of switching or stopping is almost always counterproductive. Aren't brains fun?)

A lot of players (and the vast overwhelming majority of players with the "only winning is fun" mentality are boys and men, let's not kid ourselves) inculcated on "only winning is fun, only the hardest, most unforgiving difficulty is acceptable, show no mercy to anyone" grab the label of being "hardcore" and proclaim it to be a superior status than the "casual" players that won't amount to anything through their lack of training to understand every nuance of a game and replicate it perfectly. (Then watch them put up hue and cry about changes or patches made to rebalance the game or to remove glitches and exploits they had built entire strategies around using.) See also how they gravitate toward specific types of games, designed to show individual (or, more rarely, team) "skill," where "skill" consists of pattern recognition, memorization, and the ability to replicate specific combinations and situations that are deemed worthy and top-tier, discarding vast swaths of the game and its options along the way. Genres that tend to rely on twitchiness, memorization, or frame-perfect timing, and that usually have a violent component, like first-person shooters, 2D and 3D fighting games, or the genre of twitch-platformer masochism that Kaizo Mario, I Wanna Be The Guy and La-Mulana represent (where the difficulty of the game is the point), these games tend I be the ones that attract "hardcore" players and become "hardcore" games for young men and boys being marinated in toxic masculinity.

And, y'know, for some of them, that's going to net them some nice tournament money purses. (And, apparently, some SWATting from their opponents who were sore at getting beaten.) For others, it's going to be little more than an exercise on feeling superior to other people. And then having that attitude leak or into their dealings with other people, as well, especially when bolstered by feelings of privilege or of being denied things they believe are theirs by right of their privilege. Regrettably, this is also the demographic that gets catered to in a lot of games, because they're usually the ones who have the disposable income and the time to play these games this way and to demand that game companies make their next games to cater even more to this demographic if they want to continue selling large numbers of units and consoles.

I keep coming back to Smash Brothers as an example for a lot of things, but it's one of the few games of the genre that seems to be taking active steps with each patch and new game release to counteract the demand that it turn into a game of "skill", even as it provides new methods for people who want to play it that way to do so. Smash Brothers Melee, the GameCube iteration of the franchise, was the first one to rise to tournament-level prominence and capture the interest of the Stop Having Fun, Guys crowd. It's where the snipe about "No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination" comes from, as the strain documented here decided that the only acceptable character to play was Fox, the top of the top tier, on a flat stage with no ledges nor gimmicks (Final Destination), and without any of the items turned in that could shift the balance of a game through strategic use, but were derided as "cheap" and introducing an unacceptable amount of luck into games they wanted to be decided by the skill of button-pressing alone. Some of those items are very powerful and can introduce serious complications to battles, especially battles fought on flat stages with nowhere to run or hide, but none of them are undefeatable. It requires a different kind of skill and gameplay to handle items and their effects, and to position oneself on a stage appropriately so as not to be on the receiving end of stage hazards. Despite what the Stop Having Fun, Guys crowd says, their style of gameplay is not inherently superior or better to one that uses items and regular stages.

In any case, the change between Smash Brothers Melee and Smash Brothers Brawl, the release for the Wii, was so different in terms of characters and mechanics that the scene that had so loved Melee detested Brawl and set to work creating a total conversion that would undo much of the changes to Brawl and bring back Melee. They also added other characters, changed the way the attacks worked for some of the characters, added and changed stages, and otherwise created a package that they hoped the people who loved Melee and didn't want it to change would enjoy and use for their purposes. They called it Project M, and you can read about all of the changes made from the base Brawl game to produce what they felt would be the best game for competitive tournament-level "skill" play. At the time I first encountered it, I thought of it as an interesting programming project, and looked at other people playing with it, and figured that if they were happy with what it was, they could be happy with it and I would just not be part of that scene, because I was never going to be the sort of person who played the game with the idea in mind of exploiting everything to its fullest for a competitive match. Now I look at it and realize there was so much effort undertaken to recreate the game they had felt was perfect, instead of accepting the new game for what it was and trying to learn how to play that one well.

Of course, any one of those people would look at me talking this way about their playstyle and dismiss it as a scrub whining about how everyone else is too good for them and tell me that I need to either admit that I'm just going to suck and not bother them or start training to get good and beat them, at which point I will be worthy of having my opinion be known. Because they won't acknowledge anyone who can't beat them by their own rules in a way they consider to be acceptable. Which often means they won't acknowledge anyone at all who doesn't look like them, doesn't have the same reflex abilities like them, and doesn't have the same attitude toward being a hardcore edgelord as they do.

And much like other fandoms that tried to close the door and keep others out, "hardcore" gamers find themselves besieged at every turn by the people they swore were beneath them, enjoying games, playing casually, and occasionally thrashing them without breaking a sweat. The industry they thought they could control and become the arbiters of legitimacy continued on. There are still enough pockets of this toxic environment for me to say that the industry has moved past them, but there are plenty of studios and others who are doing just fine by actively catering to and releasing games for the "casual" player, and trying to make their games more accessible and enjoyable for people of all skill levels, rather than insisting there can only be more difficulty, more complexity, and more time spent on the game to be considered merely acceptable.

And, as the "hardcore" crowd are slowly finding out, even if they won't admit to it, they're losing. But we'll talk about that part tomorrow.