A CK2 AAR: The House of Koss – Introductions

This is my first attempt at writing an AAR (After Action Report), a genre that turns gameplay into prose. AARs come in all shapes and sizes – from epic to terse and everything in between – but this one will lean heavily towards the unpretentious and comedic. It will be cross-posted here and on the Paradox forums if the reception is kind.

This is Örvar, first of the House of Koss. He has a beard, a county and no family. Don’t ask him about that last bit, it gets really awkward. Örvar wants to make a name for himself. In fact he already has: Koss. Before he was made a count, he was just ‘that guy Örvar’. Or – he gets angry just thinking about it – Ööörvar, turning the first syllable into a retching sound. Koss. He likes the sound of it. He’s been trying to turn it into a saying that “Koss is the Boss” – as if to say ‘Koss is our leader and we trust in him’ – but so far it hasn’t caught on.

I finished Just Cause 2 and saved the world and all I got was a list of credits

Apologies for the title. It’s geting late and something like ‘JC2 – thoughts on’ or ‘retrospective’ or ‘post play analysis’ sounded way too serious for something as frivolous as Just Cause 2.

I finished the game over the weekend, having completed all faction and agency missions. It has been quite a ride. However when rolling down a highway in a tank shooting up all the traffic just to see if anybody will stop you only provokes ennui… well, in the words of Just Cause 2 anonymous bark #126: “It’s time to end this!” Here are some my final thoughts on the game in the hope that I can stop playing now. At 55% completion. I know that the rest is just busywork. Who needs that? Right?

Veni, vidi, whippi – thoughts on Spelunky strategy

Okay, so now that I have completed* Spelunky, I obviously feel like I’m in a position to dole out advice on how to do it. This isn’t basic tips or do’s and don’ts like Tom Francis’ blog post from a few years back but more of a general attitude with which to approach the gameplay.

Spelunky – as I’ve said before – is a complex game. Each playthrough presents the player with a huge amount of tiny decisions from the mundane – how to kill the bat heading towards me? – to the strategic – what is my goal for this level? Cash-in-hand? The damsel? Ghost mining? Some specific achievement? Misc.? Complex games tend to develop a body of thoughts on strategy. So the question is: Is abstract strategy applicable to a game like Spelunky or is success just a matter of pure muscle memory?

A Long Shvitz: One year of Steam gaming

Today my Steam account is one year old. And twenty days. I suck at anniversaries.

On September 9th 2013 I bought Far Cry 3 on Steam for 14,99 euros. Probably at a discount. It would have had to be because I had already completed the game. Don’t ask how. I had encountered a problem, though. Ziggy’s mod for FC3 refused to work properly with my copy and explicitly stated that it wouldn’t do so with non-authorized copies. I really liked Far Cry 3 and the thought of playing it stripped of magical super powers was genuinely thrilling. So I paid up and took the medicine. It was a bitter pill to swallow: Not only did I have to down Valve’s client, I had to take Ubisoft’s Uplay client too as part of the treatment. If you’ve never come across Uplay count yourself lucky. It’s the essence of DRM bullshitware masquerading as a social network. It figuratively made me throw up in my mouth. If I was being cured of my piratical tendencies, the cure felt decidedly worse than the disease.

Mindcraft

I know how to make a leather cap in Minecraft and I’m not going to tell you.

Because you probably either stumbled upon the crafting recipe yourself or you just looked it up on the internet. Also you probably advanced to gold hats years ago, anyway, having tossed out whatever leather gear you didn’t need for Dungeon Night fetish wear. I bet creepers are really submissive what with all that self destructive behaviour. Aaaanyway…

I happened upon the ‘recipe’ (i.e. correct 3 by 3 pattern of empty space and leather) by trial and error. When I started playing Minecraft I got engrossed by just trying things out. I knew about punching trees. And had probably seen people make crafting tables. Also the annoying putdown ‘mining like a baby’ pops into my head from time to time, so I obviously read this piece on RPS. From there on I just had a go at it. When I got stuck I horsed around some more. When I got really stuck I started needlessly enlarging my mansion. When I got really, really stuck, I quit and played Spelunky for a while to get back to real life and real priorities. You know, stuff like ‘winning’ and ‘beating the game’.

I’m not sure when it became a dogme-like rule. But it’s there now. Sort of. No internet. No wikis. No outside-of-the-game hints (I do take some guidance from the in-game achievement map though). If I’m living in a cave with no electricity it stands to reason that I’m not just hopping online to learn how to make shoes, gates, or bread. Man, I wish I had bread. Rotten monster meat is nice and all but it gets a bit samey samey after a while.

After The Stanley Parable

What do you play after The Stanley Parable?

After a game that has you questioning choice, agency and free will and openly mocks video game conventions like linear storytelling, achievements and – ha! – winning, what’s next? Do you go back to acting out the role of captain Blazkowicz (who chose young guy over old guy using the old utilitarian moral choice crutch of ‘lifetime still to be had’) and make him jump though hoops to save the day?

Emergent storytelling

You know the vague foreboding that that brilliant thought (ok, Descartes-wannabe, let’s not kid ourselves, more like bad pun or meme-in-the-making) you just had is already somewhere out there on the internet. Similarly, you know the sense when people tell you that what you’re going on about as if though you were the first to think of it has a name and people have been working on it for decades.

No, what games are good at is suggesting stories. The thing that games have above all other media is interaction, which is to say that games have systems. Systems that dictate the rules of a fictional world. Systems that allow the audience to prod the world and feel it push back. Systems are what make games into games, rather than movies with joypads.

Systems vs. Stories, Dan Whitehead, EuroGamer, 22 June 2013

It’s called emergent storytelling and I’ve been thinking about it ever since obsessively playing the original Crusader Kings back in the mid 2000s.

Bold and Dashing

Gaming in style

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