Incline Chris Avellone Appreciation Station

[Curious_Tongue]

Who plays platformers?

 

[Cael]

Who plays platformers?

Everyone who has ever played Mario :D

 

[Curious_Tongue]

I was never a big Mario fan.

 

[2menLeefs]

What I was asking myself after reading MRYs shill piece is, has it been revealed what MCA was fired for?
Rape? And his sudden aversion to such in games?

 

[Nutria]

I thought it was great when he worked on Into the Breach but I don't like platformers so I feel deeply betrayed right now. I'm probably gonna need a grief counselor over this.

 

[Viata]

What I was asking myself after reading MRYs shill piece is, has it been revealed what MCA was fired for?
Rape? And his sudden aversion to such in games?

Was he banned just because of this question? Damn, feel like ResetEra where you can be banned just for "offending" some important person.

 

[Wunderbar]

What I was asking myself after reading MRYs shill piece is, has it been revealed what MCA was fired for?
Rape? And his sudden aversion to such in games?

Was he banned just because of this question? Damn, feel like ResetEra where you can be banned just for "offending" some important person.

probably someone else's alt.

 

[Haba]

What I was asking myself after reading MRYs shill piece is, has it been revealed what MCA was fired for?
Rape? And his sudden aversion to such in games?

Was he banned just because of this question? Damn, feel like ResetEra where you can be banned just for "offending" some important person.

Sorry for you loss.

 

[Latelistener]

Avellone platformer

Isn't selling too well. Also, surprisingly doesn't have online co-op. Usually when the store page says "Co-op" it means online co-op.

 

[2house2fly]

This sounds a lot like that Two Brothers or whatever it was called from a few years back. Wonder if there's a bit where one of them dies and you have to play as the other one alone without the other's power

 

[Fairfax]

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/h...s-are-players-prone-good-evil-choices-1181699

Morality in Games: Are Players Prone to Good Or Evil Choices?

Last year's 'Assassin's Creed Odyssey' is a game rife with such moral impasses.
Many developers, including for titles like 'Assassin's Creed Odyssey,' keep statistics on how audiences interact with in-game ethical dilemmas.

The trolley problem is one of the most well-known ethical thought exercises. For those unfamiliar, it asks how a person would react in the following scenario: A runaway trolley car is approaching an intersection of tracks — one containing five individuals tied to it, the other with one person secured to it — to which you stand by the controls. The dilemma, then, is which choice is the more ethical option, to do nothing and let the trolley run over five people or to pull the switch and kill the single captor.

Versions of the trolley problem have existed since the early 1900s and, over the past century, the ethical exercise has been used extensively by researchers on moral psychology. As technology has progressed, so, too, have iterations of the dilemma and nowhere in popular media are questions of moral and ethical theory more prevalent than in video games.

Beyond just entertainment, games, as an interactive medium, may offer insight into human psychology and how complex choices of morality are processed.

"Player morality is an interesting question. I’d break it into two thoughts – one is morality through game mechanic conditioning, and the second is more hopeful: the majority of people want to be good and be an agent of change in a world that allows them to be good," Chris Avellone, writer and designer of such games as Fallout: New Vegas and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Both Fallout: New Vegas and Knights of the Old Republic II present players with multitudes of moral choices throughout their playtime. As players make choices, their in-game characters are affected by those decisions which, ultimately, affect how the story plays out. This gameplay mechanic is not unique to Avellone's work and has become a standard for many games over the past two decades, many of which actually include a sliding scale that highlights the player's morality as they progress.

"There was a period of time in gaming where doing an evil or bad path in a game would clearly lead to unfavorable outcomes — failures, game over, etc. — or even a good amount of content being missed by the player," Avellone says. "Because of that tradition, I think a certain amount of conditioning occurred in players to choose the good path because they wanted to get the most content out of the game."

Moral choices presented in games are wide-ranging and famous examples include the ending of the 1994 Super Nintendo game Super Metroid in which players can choose to save animals that helped them throughout the game or leave them to perish and 2007's BioShock which allows players to choose between rescuing or "harvesting" Little Sisters, genetically enhanced girls, to raise their own powers.

In more recent titles, the line between "evil" and "good" choices is able to be blurred even further, presenting players with much more nuanced ethical problems that do not have a clear "favorable" answer. Last year's Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a game rife with such moral impasses.

"We really tried to make all of the choices contextual in terms of the characters you were talking to," Mel MacCoubrey, writer and creative director on Assassin's Creed Odyssey, says. "Some of them are based in real-world morality where, obviously, sparing someone is much nicer than killing them, but what we also tried to do was make it so that not every time that you told the truth with someone that there would automatically be a positive outcome. You could come into a situation where telling the character the truth hurts a lot more than a lie. We really tried to have the player pay attention to the choices they were making in any given situation."

One of the major issues in fleshing out various ethical choices, however, is the number of real-world hours that go into designing and crafting those branching narratives. "If you allow for evil options and want to make it a viable option, then you are often doubling the amount of design resources the game needs," says Avellone. "Rarely do projects have the budget to do this, so the good path will usually get more focus and the bad path will get less attention and be more limited as a result."

This may well lead to a chicken-and-egg scenario when aiming to unravel players' ethical tendencies. Are game developers more focused on crafting "good" narrative paths because that's what players overwhelmingly choose or are players choosing the moral options because they've been conditioned to do so?

To help answer that problem, many game developers actually keep statistics on how audiences interact with their game.

"We have a statistic that shows more people are inclined to play the altruistic choice instead of the mercenary option," says MacCoubrey. "I think, overall, you see that people are more inclined to go toward the friendlier looking option than the more aggressive option, but when you have a choice that seems more neutral — like something more logical versus emotional — they play more 50/50."

Indeed, the data from the game supports this. When broken into categories labeled "Lies vs. Truth" or "Friendly vs. Aggressive," players are overwhelmingly likely to choose the "good" option (over 60 percent compared to 30 percent in both instances). Meanwhile, the "Logical vs. Emotional" category is split nearly down the middle.

"We had a really interesting mission at the beginning of the game where you find people infected by the plague and a priest wants to kill them, but the family is innocent of anything other than being sick," MacCoubrey says of Odyssey. "You’re faced with the choice of getting involved or walking away and like 68 percent of the players decided to save the family, which I think is really interesting because if you save the family they infect the island."

Last August, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison developed their own game called Crystals of Kaydor to study whether video games could boost empathy in middle-schoolers. Over a two week period, students were broken into groups, one of which played Crystals and another which played the commercially available action RPG Bastion from Supergiant Games. The findings of the study suggested that a game designed to "increase empathic accuracy," such as Crystals, produces "behaviorally-relevant, functional neural changes in fewer than 6 hours of gameplay in adolescents."

Crystals, which was made possible by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is a non-violent game that has players controlling a group of robots who land on a distant planet and must help the alien residents with various tasks through non-verbal communication, driven by realistic facial expressions that convey the alien's emotions to the player.

"The game rewards players for helping. They can’t speak their language and only communicate through human-like emotions," Richard Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who headed the study, says. "It's a way to teach empathy. You can’t act to relieve another person’s suffering unless you know they’re suffering and in order to know they’re suffering, you need to have some degree of empathy."

"Games provide an opportunity to suspend consequences, so you can explore different aspects of yourself in this simulated world in a way you couldn’t outside of it," Nicole Lazzaro, president of video game consultancy firm XEODesign, says. "Our world is changing quite dramatically and I think games as an entertainment platform is responding. Having games without a moral component makes for much flatter games."

The aims of designing a game for the purposes of an academic study and making the next title in a bestselling series are very different, of course. However, commercial game designers are aware of the ethical questions they are asking in their works.

"We always wanted to make sure that we were putting something in that we had put a lot of thought into; that really made sense in the context for the character. They weren’t just big, bad choices for the sake of emotional shock or to put somebody in a precarious situation for no reason," MacCoubrey says. "We wanted all the various choices to fit in the story."

"I’d like to believe the majority of players want to be good and do good deeds," says Avellone. "When I’m playing a game I want to do the right thing, and from what I’ve observed, a majority of players — not all — act the same way."

 

[Alienman]

That last sentence. I guess actual roleplaying is left forgotten in a ditch.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

That last sentence. I guess actual roleplaying is left forgotten in a ditch.

That is on devs, and directly ties into this:

Avellone says. "Because of that tradition, I think a certain amount of conditioning occurred in players to choose the good path because they wanted to get the most content out of the game."

Combined with nu Bioware and alike popularizing paragon/renegade system.

 

[Roguey]

"I enjoyed putting a bullet through that bitch's skull while she was lying helpless on the deck of that yacht. Hell, I'd do it again. I still have a memento, her little necklace -- I kept it as a trophy of the kill. It still has some of her blood on it." -- RIP the man who wrote this.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

Morality cannot be correctly presented or judged in games because games provide limited and distorted situations and outcomes.
Majority of which is dumb binary extreme choice and consequence, however you twist it. As in, some games try to be "smart" and then use a dumb twist where a good choice leads into bad outcomes. Same shit really as bad choice leading into "surprising" good outcomes.

Example above is the case of the family with plague. You can "walk away"? Thats your other choice?
How about a quarantine? Or anything else. Nope, just two dumb forced choices and dumb consequences forced out of any other context.
Then of course there were choices where the goody two shoes path - executed in dumb pretentious ways would simply give you more content and best content of the game.
And all of that done in games where combat is majority of the content, so you are forced to kill hundreds without any bad repercussions and presented even as solution to all problems you encounter.

Thats what i mean by the whole medium being a dumb limited simplification in majority of cases, out of which you cannot really get any real insight into morality as it functions in the reality.
Even more distorted by the save/load mechanics.

As for women issues in Legion, it is impossible such a society would consider women anything else then tools and things, even if the main reason for keeping them out of combat was for breding purposes.
That too puts women into the role of a thing, but the psychotic macho-ultra violence-warfare-egoism way of thinking as Legion had doesnt allow anything else but extreme misogyny.

On the other hand the setting and rules prevent any significant power differential based on gender.
Mutations, sci-fi equipment, drugs, power armor, long range weapons and the rest.
Not to mention well trained women fighters would wipe the floor with whole codex of "gamer" nerd fat-ass dumbfucks in actual reality.

Also, anyone who thinks it's "reprehensible" to want women to breed as much as possible in a post-apocalyptic scenario where you're rebuilding civilization is a fucking retard.

No, you are a fucking retard and a dumb turd. Because that would mean using woman as cattle and mass rapes. Which in fact weakens such a faction and it gets exterminated.
Empirical proof - human history you dumb retarded shallow devolved cretin.

 

[2house2fly]

"I enjoyed putting a bullet through that bitch's skull while she was lying helpless on the deck of that yacht. Hell, I'd do it again. I still have a memento, her little necklace -- I kept it as a trophy of the kill. It still has some of her blood on it." -- RIP the man who wrote this.

RIP the man who gave no consequences at all for choosing that dialogue option

I like how he tries to dance around the biological differences between men and women in terms of physical strength and combat readness and then uses the biological differences in terms of breeding to justify himself, man, when creators have to dance like this to not be torched on the street, you know your culture can't create shit.

the biological differences in terms of strength are only meaningful up to a point- a strong, well-armed woman can beat up a weak man. And she can certainly shoot him from a distance. Most of the opponents the Legion would be fighting would be poorly-organised tribals, possibly starving

I'm of the opinion that the legion is lacking in so many details/had content cut because people would sympathize with them otherwise
Also, anyone who thinks it's "reprehensible" to want women to breed as much as possible in a post-apocalyptic scenario where you're rebuilding civilization is a fucking retard.

Caesar doesn't want women to "breed as much as possible" he wants them to be a 24/7 production line to provide slaves who will fight and die for him

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Nah playing Evil is unfun. I agree with Avelone in this one. Even well-done evil feels bad.

But on the other hand, the incentive of doing such a thing should be strictly kept to the abstract. There are times when good choices might bite you back in the arse and where doing evil results in more rewards. It just has to make sense when to do what.

The in-game reward, so to speak, should be determined not of good or bad choice but of whether that choice leads to more rewards or not.

 

[Roguey]

When you're tired of giving interviews at the moment:
https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/1100588393040351234

Games people. Would like to chat to some freelance game writers. Connections and suggestions please?

@casskhaw and @ChrisAvellone?

I'd ask Cassandra before me, she's a real writer.

 

[Fairfax]

 

[J_C]

He has written for the new Jedi game? Whaaaat? How was this not a bigger news? Or did I miss it?

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Wait, isn’t Paradox’s Vampire: The Masquerade game supposedly being revealed in about a month? Didn’t Paradox want MCA working on Tyranny so badly that they insisted on his participation in their contract with Obsidian?

 

[Latro]

are you guys ready for vampire cass? i'm not, i hated cass

 

[Fairfax]

He has written for the new Jedi game? Whaaaat? How was this not a bigger news? Or did I miss it?

He said a while ago that he was working with the Star Wars licence again, but this was the first time he mentioned the actual project.

Wait, isn’t Paradox’s Vampire: The Masquerade game supposedly being revealed in about a month? Didn’t Paradox want MCA working on Tyranny so badly that they insisted on his participation in their contract with Obsidian?

They insisted that he was credited and put it in the contract, which is why his name is still there. He also seems to know and interact with Paradox folks often, so there's a good chance it's the Vampire game.

 

[conan_edw]

 

[Bigg Boss]

are you guys ready for vampire cass? i'm not, i hated cass

That is why you give her over to the big dicked Van Graff gang.