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Oct 29th, 2020 at 10:49:00 - Apart of Me (iPd) |
Most students chose to play this for the assignment because it was free and accessible (they could play on their phones). Truly, no wonder mobile gaming is such a big industry. I give them options of much more "gamey" games and they all go for the free mobile game!
Nevertheless, this was a cool experience. Apart of Me was designed specifically to help youth cope with loss. It's like a virtual guide through emotions and coping behaviors. It's set up, very basically, like an RPG/simulation and has strong Animal Crossing vibes. You land on an island and are greeted by The Guide who tells you to explore, meet the island's inhabitants, and do quests for them that will help you with your loss.
Off you go exploring the little island. NPCs do give you quests (catch butterflies, explore a cave, etc.), and the reward is narrative or information about grief. For example, the first thing you do is explore a cave, wherein you have a sort of home, that contains stories of real people who have suffered loss. These stories are audio logs spoken by the survivor. You unlock more as you do more quests, and the idea is that you listen to these other young people talk about what it was like having their parent or whoever die, and you empathize and see similarities and differences in your own loss; you don't feel so alone.
By the cave is a reflection pool and meditation rocks. It's calm, tranquil, and you can actually do some guided meditation there. Students reported very much enjoying that. Another NPC tasks you with capturing butterflies with a net (hello Animal Crossing!). You are supposed to return a butterfly to the NPC, who keeps them bottled up, but you accidentally release it. When you tell this to the NPC, they say something like "Ah well, it's probably better to release them than to keep them bottled up." The butterflies are different emotions; each one you catch tells you that what you're feeling (sadness, anger, loneliness, guilt, etc.) is normal and that it's okay to feel it. Again, very cool.
There are a number of other things like the above, where good therapeutic information and advice on coping with loss is embedded into the game. The Guide even gives you exercises to take into the real world, such as writing down your best memories with the person you have lost (or sharing your favorite memories of them with another survivor). The one thing that I didn't like about this is that NPCs will repeatedly tell you that they know what you're going through, that other people have the same experiences of loss as you. This is not best practice for talking to survivors. All losses are experienced differently, despite similarities between them. If you tell someone whose mom has died, "I know how you feel," they will say or think, "You can't possibly know how this feels" because their mom was their mom and they had a relationship with her that you did not have. So, I'm not sure why this was included in the game. But, I will definitely use this one again next time, and if you're interested, it's totally worth 30 minutes of your time to see what it offers.
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Oct 27th, 2020 at 19:30:21 - The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit (PC) |
Woo! Played some games! Last time I taught Death, Grief, and Dying I came up with a two-day activity for students to play That Dragon, Cancer and do some thinking about the role of games and play in representing/coping with loss. I couldn't do the exact same game-based learning lesson virtually, so I modified the activity by using a variety of games (actually sourced from having students dig for them last time!) to give students options and broadening the questions. The variety overcame financial and technological obstacles, which I'm really happy about! I had two free options and games that could be played across PC, console, phones, and iPads: That Dragon, Cancer; Gris; Apart of Me; and The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit.
This game was a nice surprise, a short slice of compelling story tackling tough themes of death, alcoholism, and child abuse, as well as more uplifting ones like imagination and fantasy. This is an "in between" sort of episode of the Life is Strange series. I don't know how (if) it relates to the first game, and apparently it is a prequel of sorts to the second. You play as a young boy named Chris who lives with his alcoholic dad. Chris's mom/dad's wife has somewhat recently died and dad isn't taking it too well.
As Chris, you spend a morning playing in your room, eating breakfast with your dad, exploring outside your house, mourning your mother, and hoping that your dad will take you Christmas tree shopping like he promised. He gets busy drinking early and watching basketball though, so it's unlikely they ever go tree shopping. No matter. There is plenty to do around the house for an hour-and-a-half. Most of these things have the potential to piss off your drunk, angry dad.
Which is what I found so compelling about the game. Normally in videogames, I poke and prod characters, try a bunch of dialogue options, have fun pissing off NPCs if possible. In this game, I did not want to piss off the dad. I didn't want to call and order a pizza, I didn't want to pretend to zap his whiskey bottle, I didn't want to compare his cooking to my mom's cooking, I didn't want to wake him up after he passed out, I didn't want to play with a dinosaur toy on the floor in the den where he was watching TV. The game succeeds in making you think your actions will bring literal harm to Chris. It effectively establishes an abusive relationship in a realistic setting.
After I finished the game though, I did go back and see what Chris's father would do in response to some of these behaviors. Surprisingly, he doesn't do anything except be irritated with you. There is one funny interaction I found. When he is watching the basketball game (and here, I thought back to my own childhood), if you stand in front of the TV, he will make comments like "Chris, I can't see through you, you know." My dad used to say, "You're a door, not a window." But he never really yells and doesn't get physical, even though it's clear that he has before.
This was absolutely worth the 90-120 minutes it took to poke around and, although none of my students actually chose to play it, I'll keep it on the list for this assignment in the future.
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Sep 10th, 2020 at 23:54:31 - Clustertruck (PC) |
This semester hit like a ton of bricks and I have had zero time to even think about playing a game for the past few weeks. But man, tonight I had a great time for 45 minutes just playing this stupid stream-friendly, meme-worthy, speedrunning game about leaping across the tops of semi trucks. I exhausted myself from working ungodly hours this week and not sleeping enough, passed out at 7pm, woke up at 10:00pm, and felt oddly rejuvenated. I decided not to grade essays, which my brain was trying to default toward. I watched some YouTube, talked to my girlfriend, and then, surprised at not being tired yet, thought it would be nice to play a chill game. Enter Clustertruck, an old one that I got from Twitch Prime years ago.
The game isn't actually that chill. It's pretty frantic. But you can pick it up and put it down, which is what I realized I wanted, not necessarily chill. The premise, like I've said, is simple. There are semi trucks. They drive forward. You run along the tops of them and jump between them. They will crash and there are obstacles. Avoid all that mess. Jump higher, run faster, do some tricks and rack up points. Use your points to buy upgrades (double jump, mid-air dash, slow time, etc.) so you can go faster and correct mistakes before they kill you. That's it. That's the game.
I found two ways to play. The first is how I think the devs intended. You play it like a crazy twitch game and try to chase high scores. The second is actually relaxing. You stand on top of the trucks and ride. Yes, they will crash and you'll need to jump occasionally. But, see if you can get on a truck that takes you all the way to the goal at the end of the level. You have a good vantage point to observe the mayhem happening around you. I wonder if the devs considered a photo mode, or if anyone has found out which trucks in each level will go all the way to the end without crashing. I'm not sure how scripted the trucks' paths are. Like, does truck #52 always collide with truck #36 going around the sharp turn on level 1.4? Does the boulder trigger after truck #11 crosses a line and always roll into trucks #23, 24, and 25? Not sure!
Controls are sufficiently balanced between tight and floaty for this kind of game. It's not built for precision really, but more to make the player panicked all the time because you don't know exactly if your character (which you never see because of the first-person perspective) is going to land where you intend. I do wish you had more control over your lateral movement in midair. Speaking of your character, when you run and jump, there is a sort of metallic clanking sound effect sometimes. I think this is probably meant to be the sound of running on a truck trailer, but I like to imagine it is my feet and I am a robot.
It was so nice to relax for an evening and not be prepping online classes or doing the schedule or teaching someone how to use technology or preparing assessment reports or writing another abstract or blah blah blah. Just. Dodging exploding trucks. And the world hasn't ended.
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Aug 23rd, 2020 at 15:46:47 - Xenoblade Chronicles X (WiiU) |
I can't believe I never wrote anything for this. Woops! Long story short: I'm shelving it because of the grind.
Xenoblade Chronicles X is a sequel in name and gameplay mechanics to Xenoblade Chronicles, which I beat earlier this year. I suppose it was my first big quarantine game and this is likely my last. Fitting! It takes everything from the first game and makes it bigger. The game is humongous. The world is beautiful. It's like a single-player MMORPG. I'll start with some things I enjoyed and finish with my gripes, including the big one about the grind.
There's a lot to love here. Setting and narrative context are excellent, really. The last remnant of humanity crash lands on an alien planet. Pieces of the "life hold," which everyone needs to survive long-term, are scattered. Hostile alien races have taken a foothold on the planet and are hunting humanity down (not sure why exactly, didn't get that far), and you'll encounter friendly races too. The crashed ship is a city with six districts. It's a living city. NPCs don't have daily schedules, but will appear certain places at certain times of day for quests and things. Their society is complex. There's an organization called BLADES which fulfill many of the useful functions having to do with exploring the planet, gathering resources, expanding intel, killing native monsters (indigens), and even mediating squabbles between the populous. There are divisions for each of these (eight in total) specialties, and you can join them. The web of complexity governing characters' relationships and interactions is difficult to wrap my head around. There are hundreds upon hundreds of quests/missions of various types. Some are really basic categories like gathering items or killing indigens, but many are narrative and add depth to the city. The hundreds of NPCs are engaged in other vital tasks too like building water plants, growing food, and governing.
You know what. The thought of writing in more depth about the 50 hours I sunk into this game is daunting. It's huge, okay? There are many intertwining systems to learn and I still do not understand some of them. For example, I glossed over equipment completely. I never bought or upgraded a single piece. I just got my Skell (flying mech) and have no idea how to outfit it or use it, and the thought of having to get three more Skells for other characters makes me nauseous. There are easily over 1000 items. The game is so huge you use two screens to play. The handheld Wii controller with the screen is where you engage with the map layers (fast travel, checking completion criteria for the game's hex grid spaces [again, literally hundreds of tasks to check off to complete these grids], following objective markers, setting up your mining and research probe networks...). I will say I LOVED having a dedicated screen for the map in this game. It was fun to use and integral to the experience. It made me feel like I was really out in the world surveying this alien planet with this mobile technology in my hands.
The writing is infinitely better than Xenoblade Chronicles. I regularly chuckled when given dialogue options. They are often sarcastic and hyperbolic and it's like your character isn't taking it seriously. The quest responses are some of my favorite things in the game, and a lot of the quests are wacky too. There's one where you meet an alien who says he can travel through time and you have to go buy a car for him. Then he gets stuck, not in time, but on an island in the middle of the ocean, and you have to go save him. In another, you can help a character run away from her possessive husband with her new lover by gathering materials for her to stitch together a fake baby to convince her lover to keep her around (yikes!). When he immediately falls for it, you can call her out ("Mutter loudly about how it's clearly a stuffed animal") or support her ("Tremble at the awe-inspiring sight of life's new dawn."). In another quest, you're helping an alien understand human emotions. After you do enough, the alien says something about how much emotional range humans have. You can "Accept" this conclusion or "Deny" it: "Explain that you are dead inside." Really, I might have quit the game sooner had I not enjoyed these dialogue options so much!
And for the sake of time, the game requires hours upon hours upon hours of grinding. I played about 50 hours and feel like I did nothing of substance for at least 25% of it, just running around the map trying to find collectibles for quests or taking random "kill x monsters" missions to get experience to unlock the next story quest. See, story quests and "affinity missions" have level caps and other pre-requisites. I occasionally had to direct my attention to grinding to reach a requirement. Often you don't have to grind because there are so many other fun ways to get experience, largely involving exploring, but once that sort of runs out (i.e., you've explored most everywhere), then what's left? I finished Chapter 7 or 8 at level 26. The next chapter had a level requirement of 30, and the next affinity mission was 28. I hadn't had to deal with nearly that much of a gap yet. I figured I'd be able to find plenty of side missions and things to do. But like 8 hours later, I had finally hit 28 and did the affinity mission. Still two more levels to go for 30 and advancing the story. For all the game has going for it, I'll use this fun phrase: "It doesn't respect the player's time." There is so much noise. And it takes some of its simulation so seriously, which adds drag and downtime. For example, you are the main character, and you have two other pretty much main characters. But those two, plus like 15 others, can be switched in and out of your party. Every single time you switch a character out, they go back to a specific place in the city. If you want to add them to your party again, you have to literally go to where they are to recruit them back. And many quests will limit who you can have in your party, require specific characters, so that you frequently are changing characters in and out and sometimes kicking everyone out if the quest requires just you. Then you have to run around the city finding them all again to add them back. I hated that feature so much. Yeah, it's realistic, but my god, who cares?! I know that Doug is a Harrier and is going to spend time in the Hangar. I don't need it reinforced by having to go all the way there every time I want to add him to my party!
Ugh. Okay. That's it! Done with this and almost done with the Wii U! Then I can move on to the PS4.
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