Spoilers for a side quest in Ghostwire: Tokyo
Loothound:
Programming note: I only have my phone with me today, which I hate trying to type actual thoughts out on, so my contributions will probably be very brief and to the point.
Feminina:
COMMUNICATION ACKNOWLEDGED
You know, just in solidarity.
Loothound:
Acknowledged.
<<crosses arms over chest>>
END COMMUNICATION
Actually, it just occurred to me that I can type on my computer, AirDrop it to my phone, then copy & paste to an email, so we'll see.
WORKAROUNDS!!!
Butch:
That's how I'm going to picture the two of you chatting at the end of long days. Ah, marriage.
Here's, again, where I wonder how you guys are done. I actually got to play, yesterday, so I thought, "I'll grab the turbine, fix the bike, endgame, we'll be blogging on the end in no time!"
What I did was get the turbine (check), clear the last couple of gates, finish up the hide and seek quest which was longer than one would've thought (especially cuz that kid IS good at hide and seek....) and did the first two parts of the "follow Erika for Rinko" bit that STILL isn't over!
It still isn't over!
Anyway....
In that hide and seek quest, found that weird purple glowing cave and, after that, every single time that kid went to hide again I thought "OK, NOW he's in the cave" and he was never in the cave. Stupid kid.
I found it very, very interesting that KK seemed absolutely sure that the kid was going somewhere better, somewhere good. When he was reassuring the kid at the end, that didn't seem like "I don't know what's gonna happen, but I'm going to calm this child." He seemed to know that this kid was going someplace at last pretty good. That's how I read it. Did you read it differently as you played in Japanese?
That was kind of a sad quest. Poor kid just wanted people to play with him and be nice.
I MUST be almost done. I say that knowing that so very many spirits will remain unsaved, kappa won't be caught and cats will be disappointed.
Feminina:
I also kind of wondered about that. What is KK so confident is going to be 'better' about the next step? At first glance and with a primarily western/Christian cultural background, it reads as if he's referring to an afterlife full of eternal heavenly bliss, but that doesn't seem like a very Shinto or Buddhist concept.
So maybe he just means the kid will be reincarnated and have another chance to work toward enlightenment: one could certainly say that being able to move on along the cycle of existence, in whatever form that process takes, is better than being stuck in any one place.
This would also kind of tie in with the idea that what Hannya is trying to do is a bad idea not because he's an evil person who wants to hurt other people, but because it breaks the natural cycle, and that just isn't a good thing.
And maybe they translated it into English as 'a better place' knowing that it would likely read one way to people with a certain background, and figuring that would be understandable/comforting to those players in a way that getting into a big background explanation would not.
In other news...uh...poked around last night, picked up some trophies. Had to look up the last tanuki on the internet to find them, they're just so hard to see. I regret nothing.
I was also wondering if some of the prayer beads were hidden in some weird place so I was reading about them online too and there's an article explaining that mostly they come from shrines once you clear torii gates, and it says "none of them are missable."
Don't you tell ME what's missable. It turns out there were two that were indeed at shrines near gates I cleared, and I just...hadn't picked them up. Ahem.
Butch:
HA!
Femmy: I shall google to cheat and get this trophy.
Internet: You don't need to cheat to get this trophy.
Femmy: Actually, I do.
Internet: No you don't.
Femmy: I really do.
Internet: Tough shit, I ain't telling.
Femmy: But you're the internet!
Internet: La la la can't hear you!
Femmy: Don't you have anything for me?
Internet: Have a cat video!
Femmy: Fuck you, internet.
Loothound:
Oh, man, can I tell you how utterly annoyed I was about that glowing purple cave in the hide and seek mission? Game, could you please make that cool looking glowing cave mean SOMETHING!?! I thought that some monster would come out of it for you to fight after the final finding, but no. Cool tease, no payoff. There are actually a lot of things in this game I kind of want to say that about.
Okay, the spirits moving on thing. The spirituality in this game is kind of vague and jumbled, and I think some of that is on purpose so that they could use a bunch of different themes and ideas together without the mismatches being too obvious. That being said, I really don't see much in this game that is reflective of Buddhism, so reincarnation being part of the puzzle doesn't click with me. The yokai and mystical elements are mostly consistent with what I know about Shintoism, so I've been operating under the assumption that it is sort of the main supernatural source for the game's ideas. I'm not super clear on Shinto cosmology, but the general beliefs don't really look at the world through a good/evil lens, but rather a pure/impure lens. Funeral practices are mostly about purifying the deceased person's spirit, and that a family's ancestors form a sort of collective that guides and protects the family. However it works in reality, the game probably wanted to simplify things a bit for an international audience, so writing things in a way that leaves them open to interpretation in a more western sense might have been intentional. Or it could be a lost in translation thing. I really wish I spoke Japanese, mostly because I want to know what the rain says (that and the 'game world ends here' barrier thing).
Maybe, too, 'a better place' means anything that isn't trapped in this endless loop of whatever the hell is going on.
Whichever, Hannya is trying to move fast and break things. He's a dick no matter how you slice it.
Feminina:
'Cheating' is such an ugly word. I prefer 'actions external to the established rules.' The 'x' makes it sound cool!
Ha! That was hard work for a Futurama joke, but I couldn't think of a shorter way to say cheating that used 'ex'.
I had already forgotten about the purple cave, which I guess for some reason did not bother me nearly as much. I did like that quest as a change of pace: it was a nice way to get us to a different environment, which was fun to wander around in for a while, even if, since nothing much happened, I wouldn't have wanted to spend hours there.
Like those kappa missions where you end up in a sunny, pleasant park or something that bears no relation to the Tokyo we see around us in most of the game – maybe kappa can create their own little pocket universes.
Loothound:
Okay. I'm not going to belabor it, but unless there are some sort of established, competitive rules that we're trying to adhere to I generally don't feel that strongly about it. Depending on circumstances.
Also, I'm kicking myself for not ending the last one:
<<Crosses arms>>
END PONTIFICATION
Feminina:
Oh, man, yeah, you really missed the ball on that. 10 points from Pontificator House!
Butch:
I'm just bitter because I never get platinums. Except for Toem.
Crap, now I want to fire up Bugsnax again.....
Loothound:
Dude, there is maybe, MAYBE, one or two Platinums on our board that weren't a team effort on our part. Hell, the Skyrim one absolutely HAD to be, because on that mission where they try to get you to join the Black Hand I just murdered them all. Try to make me kill helpless people on their knees, you guys suck. I didn't realize that you needed to do their shit for a trophy, so Femmy had to get that one. You're doing it solo, so totally different circumstances.
Fucking Black Hand. Screw those people.
Feminina:
Totally. It's much easier with two people. Though Horizon is all mine.
That headshot is going to be the thing that stops us on this one. I'm not worried about the rest of them, the internet will have our back and I will feel no shame, but there's no way to cheat a headshot.
Whether or not we even believe in cheating. Which I think is such an interesting concept, even though I obviously don't feel strongly opposed to it. I mean, I'll give a fair try to getting everything on my own, and then, yeah, if I'm interested in collecting trophies, I'll look it up.
Though in a way does just feel like...cheating.
Even though no one is injured in any way since we're not playing competitively or getting any material advantage from having a platinum in this game. In fact, the company would probably far prefer that we look stuff up, if the alternative is that we get tired of trying to do it on our own and stop playing. If we look at the trophy list and think "OK, this platinum is achievable if we maybe look some things up," and I play for an additional...3 hours?...collecting things I look up, that's still 3 hours I've played their content, compared to if we looked up the trophies and said "no way we're finding all those voice logs without the internet, I'm done here."
I guess maybe it's not so much about whether something is CHEATING, as whether it's WRONG. There's a part of me that feels that anything I don't do on my own based on information I am specifically told in-game is cheating – but also, that it's not wrong, because it doesn't hurt anyone.
So we could summarize this as arguing that cheating is not always bad: if it negatively impacts another person it's wrong, but cheating with no measurable impact on anyone else is fine.
I think (siding with Loothound's previous pontification) that there's a very reasonable argument that if you're allowed to do something, it can't be cheating, so the term 'cheating' isn't even meaningful in this context. There's no rule against looking things up online, no video game, when you purchase it, asks you to sign a form—even a nonbinding one--indicating that you will not look anything up (they don't even have a load screen saying "please don't consult the internet!"), and there's certainly no law against looking up things about video games, so the very concept of cheating can't even apply. (It might apply in specific circumstances like competitive gaming leagues, but in that case there would be additional rules spelling out what the players in that situation can and can't do: you're cheating the competition, not the overall world of games.)
So...yeah. An intriguing philosophical question, but in the end, I'll look things up online at the point where the game is more enjoyable for me that way than it is trying to do something without looking it up.
So if Loothound felt very, very strongly that cheating was terrible and that he didn't want to be associated with a dishonestly gained platinum, I would play on a different account because that would mean my cheating was negatively impacting another person and was therefore wrong.
All that said, honestly, I do kind of feel subjectively that it's borderline cheating to even look up the trophy list, even though CLEARLY it is absolutely expected that we will do this.
But then, I feel it's borderline cheating to look at the picture on the box when doing a jigsaw puzzle, so I guess I have both really strict standards, and, in the case of games, a great ability to cheerfully ignore them if they interfere with the point of the whole thing which is: it's a game, and I'm doing it for fun, and so the thing that makes it most fun is the way to go.
END PONTIFICATION
Butch:
Oh I never said it was wrong. I plan on merrily cheating and save scumming my whole damn way through BG3. I own this.
You cannot cheat at headshots, this is so. And another reason I will not be getting a platinum.
Feminina:
Save scumming? YOU MONSTER.
Loothound:
Wow, that was...a lot.
I understand all of the points you're making, Femmy, and I get it. I guess if I had to summarize my position better it would be to say that to me it's kind of a gradient of authenticity. Someone who gets the trophies completely independently, according to your standard, is the most praiseworthy. When they talk about trophying on something it means something far more significant than when others do. If there is some eternal gaming scoreboard in the sky, they are at the top of it. If someone pops in a game for the first time, loads a playthrough video on a laptop or something, and just apes the playthrough video beginning to end to get all of the trophies, then they have done something infinitely less praiseworthy. I would have less respect for them than I would someone who just played the game and got only the story trophies. They would have earned a little bit of contempt from me, frankly, because they're kind of not even PLAYING the game. I don't know that I think of them as having cheated, though, since they themselves still did the thing in the game. They didn't hack the game's code to get the trophy. They didn't have someone else get the trophy for them.
Well, I guess I would need to get a bit more specific about it. If the trophy were for solving a puzzle, or any other activity where ACTUALLY FIGURING OUT WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO DO IN THE FIRST PLACE is the point, then that is cheating. You did not, yourself, do the thing that the trophy is being awarded for. So...maybe finding tanuki falls in that category? I'm not sure how I feel about that yet.
Things like combat trophies, though, are not the same thing. You have to actually pull the thing off in game, and watching videos or looking at maps WON'T help you do that. Hell, some trophies are so fucking improbable that there is almost no way they would occur through natural gameplay. There was a trophy is AC Brotherhood that went something like this: from standing on the back of a galloping horse you need to grab onto and swing from a bar through the air into an aerial assassination of someone. Maybe, MAYBE, someone in the great wide world pulls that off without knowing that it was a trophy feat. MAYBE. I knew what the trophy was for and spent hours just looking for a location where I might be able to pull it off, without success. Gave up and looked it up. Then spent maybe 70-80 attempts trying to pull it off before succeeding.
So, it's complicated.
Also, save scumming? The fuck is THAT?
Also, also, I WILL be getting the headshot trophy…
Feminina:
At least you don't have to do it from the back of a running horse. I believe in you.
I believe save scumming is keeping a lot of saves specifically so that if you don't like the consequences of a decision you can reload and do something else.
I do kind of think this is cheating, but again, it's not forbidden, and if that's how you most enjoy the game, then go for it.
I think I feel slightly more strongly about this because it involves story instead of mechanics, and there's a part of me that respects the craft of a story more than the cleverness of hiding a tanuki, I guess (sorry, tanuki-hiders!), and so I feel like it violates the narrative to go back and do something differently whereas this isn't really the case when finding something hidden.
On the other hand, I have absolutely done something that didn't work out great and then let myself die in the ensuing fight rather than survive, then done the other thing, so I'm no purist.
Butch:
Indeed. Save scumming is saving before, say, a conversation where you try to woo a sorceress and then, if your lines don't work, reloading.
Really, saving before any important decision.
If you played Life is Strange, the first one, that's really about save scumming your whole life.
Oh, if only.
I cannot, will not, wait this long for nudity and romance to let it slip away due to my own bad decisions!
Too much like high school if I do.
Feminina:
Yeah, I think maybe that's part of why I feel differently about this than about looking things up. If I were willing to put in the time to go over the map inch by inch, I COULD eventually find all the tanuki/voice logs/whatever. It would just cease to be enjoyable for me. 'Cheating' at this is taking a shortcut, not a making a significant departure from what I could achieve on my own if I only cared enough. So the 'crime' here is really laziness or a lack of persistence...old people these days not willing to put in the hard work, etc.
Going back to re-do something in the story is not possible without reloading a previous save, no matter how much time you're willing to put in (you generally can't convince that sorceress to give you a second chance while pretending you didn't say that annoying thing that made her write you off in the first place), so 'cheating' is achieving something you otherwise could not. So, rather than laziness, the 'crime' is a refusal to accept the consequences of an action and an attempt to subvert the natural order to meet our own preferences. Like Hannya, we seek to break reality itself!
I don't object to it, and I certainly can't say I've never reloaded an old save myself (though I usually try to avoid it), but I think that's why it feels like a different category to me.
Loothound:
Okay, I think I see the shape of this now. While I've definitely saved and redone things in games, I can't think of a time when I did it to kind of break the story per se, I definitely have done it just because I wanted to see how things would play out in two different ways in the short term. Even though I didn't want to play Shepard as an asshole, I definitely wanted to enjoy the spectacle of Shepard being an asshole. Such an entertaining asshole, that one. And to your point, Butch, if you replace the word 'sorceress' with 'Miranda Lawson,' then we are definitely on the same page. Morrigan wasn't my vibe, but Liliana sure was. Ditto Yennifer vs. Triss. Must be something about redheads…
Femmy, I think you hit the nail on the head with your shortcuts vs. cheats distinction. I think that covers my feeling pretty well, although a lot of these things are so situational that I feel like there could be a lot of discussion about it on any given trophy. Maybe there's just an 'I know it when I see it' standard here.
Like with sorceresses.
Butch:
Well, I defend my save scumming because, so often, I'm not trying to "accomplish" something (let's face it: you're going to accomplish the something in a game unless you choose not to finish it. Hannya, archdemon, wild hunt, whatever. They're going down) in a game so much as I'm trying to tell the story the way I want it told. I can't stand it when a player is given a choice in the name of choice that makes no narrative sense. I can't stand it when a game will bar a player from doing something that DOES make narrative sense in the name of accomplishment.
It's why you never have to save scum in a game like ghostwire. In terms of the actual narrative, you're going to accomplish everything. You're eventually going to beat that boss, you're eventually going to find that kid, etc.
The trophies exist to give people who want a sense of accomplishment, instead of just the experience of an interactive story, the chance to get it.
I think the reason I platted Toem was, in that game, the doing WAS the story. The whole point of the game was the joy in doing...well...everything. It wasn't about trophies or collectibles, it was making your grandma proud that you went out into the world, and, in doing so, you didn't just complete the game, you got all the trophies.
Most games, that's not true. This game isn't ABOUT getting cat toys. The Witcher wasn't ABOUT winning Gwent tournaments (was it? It wasn't. Was it?). Thus, those things existed to challenge players who wanted to say "Ah HA! I did that! BOOM!"
To me, making a story as impactful as it could be is something that's worth it. It made sense for Judy and V to be together, so, if I save scum to make that happen, so be it.
Also, a major reason I play games is to shoot the shit about them later. Save scumming often leads to good bloggage because I can say "Hey, guess what happens if you DIDN'T do that/make that check/did the other thing?" which often goes to a better analysis of how the story was constructed in the first place. Imagine being able to read a chapter of Moby Dick, then read another draft of the same chapter, the insight that would give into Melville's mind.
Would make for some good bloggage.
Feminina:
Oh, you don't have to defend yourself. We know and accept that you're a monster who has no respect for the laws of heaven and earth. I assume you also wear a creepy mask around the house.
Loothound:
Wait, what is the problem about wearing creepy masks around the house?
Butch:
My mask is not creepy!
It's chic.
Feminina:
I would probably describe mine as 'outre.'
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