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On Why Scoring Sucks And Those Who Defend It Are Aspies

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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 17:58

That is not to say that the positive comments on cerebral games or what I am about to post here CAN be used to defend scoring -- what I am saying is that these comments could very easily be MISused to defend scoring, because, if you are dense and not capable of understanding the difference between theory and practice, you could misconstrue them to do so.
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 18:01

So I am going to analyze here the entire immediate PRACTICAL dimension of the issue, whose implications zinger did not fully grasp (since his post implies that he simply stopped playing for score, which as I will be explaining here is not quite a very good idea), and then I'll probably end up reshaping these formulations and adding them to the "Notes on the Arcade Culture" essay in Volume II, which will include a number of random discussions on the topic, including Recap's "correct" way to 1CC, etc.
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 18:08

So why is it a bad idea to completely stop playing for score?

First thing you need to understand here is the difference between theory and practice. Theory is a kind of practice, and practice a kind of theory, but the difference is that practice is concerned with IMMEDIATE things and actions, whereas theory for the FUTURE. So my essay explained why scoring systems in videogames with stage progression is a bad idea (except for transitional titles like Pac-Man, etc.), but that is an almost entirely different issue than the one we are faced with when we ALREADY have a game in front of us -- say, Mushihime-sama Futari -- and are trying to figure out what is the best way to play it in order to extract the maximum of enjoyment from it.

Be back soon. People are welcome to post in-between my posts if they have something to say. It'd be fun to see if anyone can foreshadow what I am about to say.
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 18:49

Here is an example outside of shooting games, so that more people will understand it. The first stages in Halo are awesome, but the later ones suck balls. Therefore, from a THEORY perspective, which is not really concerned with Halo but with A HALO SEQUEL, the later stages should be completely removed (at least if it's not for whatever reason possible to significantly improve them). But when we say this, we don't mean that someone should turn back time and remove the later stages from Halo and release it with only the first ones (since this is not only physically impossible, but even undesirable, since we only LEARNED that it's best to remove the later stages BY PLAYING THEM) -- all we are doing is setting down the PRINCIPLES by which FUTURE games in the Halo mold should be made in order to MAXIMIZE pleasure.

But all of that has nothing to do with two dudes sitting in front of their TV and trying to have as much fun as possible with Halo. For first off, the dudes have no idea that the later stages suck before actually playing them. Second off, when they get to the FIRST stage that sucks, they have no idea if the NEXT stage will also suck, or if things will end up improving there. And moreover, even if they know, from some other trustworthy source, that all the later stages suck, that means IN COMPARISON TO THE FIRST ONES -- not that there's absolutely NO PLEASURE AT ALL to be had from playing them.

See what I am saying here?

So in the specific case of Halo, the criticism/theory (and they work the exact same way here, because criticism is also not really ever concerned with its object, but always with the optimal method to construct similar future objects) would say that the game would have been better off if the later stages had not been included, whereas the best advice on how to play the game (which would again come from the critic, of course, i.e. from me) would be to play them with a friend in co-op, because at least then you can run through them faster (and thus experience less tedium), by piggybacking on each other's deaths (i.e. players dying and respawning in succession, so that they are always moving forward), instead of in single-player, where every death sends you back to the last checkpoint, and thus, if you are playing in Legendary, or even Heroic, it could take you fucking days to get through it -- IF you could stomach the tedium of those endless featureless corridors and identikit attack scenarios -- which I wouldn't be able to, which is why I am advocating the co-op tactic.

That does NOT mean that that fucking retarded co-op tactic is a good way around which to design a game, or even to just simply play it. If you play a great game like that, or, even worse, if you DESIGN your game with that idea in mind, YOU ARE RUINING IT. But in the specific case of the later stages of Halo, assuming you WANT to play them, and you don't just want to turn off the console when you reach them (which you understandably are not going to want to, since you ARE, after all, immersed in this game's high-immersion world, and would like some kind of closure before leaving it), then this is the best way to do it.

More soon.
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 19:08

And here's an even more tangible example.

The theory says that eating fast food is bad for you. In ideal conditions no one should ever eat fast food; there is absolutely no reason to do so and you'd have nothing to gain by it; on the contrary, you'll only be harming your health.

And yet, when I was in Stockholm last year, there were a couple of nights that I didn't make the "kitchen closing" time of their retarded restaurants (something like 10pm lol), and was forced to eat McDonalds, BECAUSE I SIMPLY HAD NO OTHER OPTION. I can't even remember the last time I ate McDonalds, I think it was sometime around '96 or so in my student days, and even then only because I was dragged there by people with whom I'd gone out. And yet there I was in Stockholm last year, ordering two double cheesburgers with fries, etc., drenched with salt to the point of not being able to taste anything, because I couldn't stand the idea of going to bed on an empty stomach (I wouldn't have been able to sleep, or at least to sleep well, which would probably have been even more harmful to my health than eating McDonald's).

So the subhumans would immediately come out and say LOOK HE'S EATING FAST FOOD -- ALL HIS TALK ABOUT FAST FOOD BEING BAD FOR YOU WAS PURE POSING.

But as I hope everyone should be able to understand by now, that is pure nonsense.
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 19:25

Let's now take a shooting game, to start getting back to zinger, and let's pick a generally well-known one so more people can follow. Take Giga Wing, for instance. Now Giga Wing is a very aesthetically awkward game, which can even be called downright ugly, if you want to be mean about it. So being immersed inside its fairly ugly stages is not exactly a huge incentive to keep playing it. Moreover, due to the charge-shield mechanic, it's not a very hard game either (which in this specific case is good, by the way, since a hard AND ugly game is a bad idea, since the ugliness gives you one more reason to NOT put up with its difficulty, etc.)

BUT, here's where the scoring system comes in. By using the shield at the exact point when the screen is full of bullets, you can turn the bullets into medals. You can practically flood the screen with medals if you know what you are doing. Then you collect the medals and your score shoots up exponentially.

Now, from a theory perspective, all this shit is fucking retarded. WTF bullets turn into medals? I mean even in comic books, where basically anything goes, you will never see a panel with a spaceship in outer space surrounded by fucking medals -- even fucking comic book writers can't pull this stunt off while maintaining suspension of disbelief -- so what the medalling fagotry does is basically DESTROY the immersion factor of the game, AT LEAST FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE AESTHETICALLY SENSITIVE AND NOT AUTISTIC ASPIES.
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 19:30

So basically, you have two choices here. If you are determined to play only the NATURAL way (i.e. for survival, which by the way is a misnomer which I will also be explaining in the "Notes on the Arcade Culture" essay -- no one plays for "survival", people play for "domination"), then you might as well give up on Giga Wing because it's ugly and easy, and play one of the countless other STGs which are a hundred times prettier and harder.

On the other hand, if you try out the reflect-medalling mechanic a little bit, you'll probably realize that it is HELLA ADDICTIVE. Which is the point at which the aspies will exclaim SEE WE TOLD YOU SO! PLAYING FOR SCORE IS SO MUCH MORE COMPLICATED AND BETTER, AND HENCE MORE IMMERSIVE, EVEN GOING BY YOUR OWN THEORY!
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 19:42

But as people should be able to grasp by now, this objection is pure bullshit, for in the order of rank of shooting games Giga Wing played for score stands FAR LESS BELOW not of GIGA WING PLAYED FOR SURVIVAL, but of, for example, KETSUI PLAYED FOR SURVIVAL.

See what I did there? Take a look at the order of rank:

Ketsui (survival)
Giga Wing (score)
Giga Wing (survival)

It's the typical subhuman inability to conceptualize anything beyond an erection. They see that A SINGLE GAME PLAYED FOR SCORE is more fun THAN A SINGLE GAME PLAYED FOR SURVIVAL, but they fail to see the THOUSANDS OF GAMES PLAYED FOR SURVIVAL which stand ABOVE THAT SINGLE GAME (or five or six or seven) PLAYED FOR SCORE, get it? If I were to fully populate that list with all the shooting games ever, the top of the list would be full of survival titles (or titles played for survival), and the scoring ones (or titles played for scoring) would occupy the bottom part, or at least the middle.

In short, the subhumans, as explained in my Genealogy, are utterly incapable of grasping how the scientific method works, and seriously believe that rules should be infallible (like gods and magic in the old days) and that the exception disproves the rule.
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 20:38

I will return to the theoretical, and practical, implications of all the above shortly, and perhaps get into a few more examples, because this stuff is indeed quite complicated, and the more examples I've done for you the better, but this is a good point I think to stop and re-examine a bit aspie psychology, in light of our new insights.

So we saw that the theoretical problem is how to maximize pleasure IN FUTURE TITLES, whereas the practical problem is how to maximize pleasure FROM EXISTING ONES.

So, in the case of Giga Wing, the way to maximize pleasure is quite simply to play for score. So when the aspies defend the idea that playing for score in some games is preferable, they are not at all mistaken.

And this does not only hold for Giga Wing, but for ALL shooting games (and by extension all games). For even with a game like Ketsui, where survival-play is basically more or less the zenith, the highest point that shooting games have achieved, IF YOU ARE DETERMINED TO SUCK OUT EVERY LAST OUNCE OF ENJOYMENT FROM THE GAMEWORLD, YOU WILL SOONER OR LATER BE COMPELLED TO PLAY FOR SCORE.

I explained all this in the essay. It's why Josh mastered Metal Slug's scoring system, and when he was done with it even went BEYOND IT, by making his OWN scoring system, and in fact SEVERAL of them, and counting how many times he pressed up or down on the controller or whatever.

You HAVE to do shit like this if you want to remain inside that tiny world forever WITHOUT GOING FUCKING MAD FROM BOREDOM.

See what I am saying?
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 20:46

You know when you are eating a really delicious cake, or gulping down a great mixed fruit juice? And like, the first few mouthfuls, or gulpfuls, are pure bliss, and then you get to the end, and you are left with some crumbs on your plate, or a few drops of liquid in the glass, and are desperately trying to scoop them up, spending more time scooping than eating or drinking. Isn't that quite annoying?

See what I am saying here?
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 20:48

Wouldn't you rather have a new glass of juice, or another plate of cake, than to keep scooping all the tiny bits that are left for half a fucking hour, only you can't quite justify to yourself the extra 5 or 10 euros for the new plate or glass (since you are, after all, at an expensive restaurant), so you are in this middle state which is more torture than enjoyment?
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 20:53

And then, there is the fact that, even if you were willing to order another plate or glass, you'd have to actually ORDER it, and it'd take a while for them to BRING it to you, so you keep procrastinating, and out of pure INERTIA simply keep scooping up or sucking on your straw or whatever, like a fucking idiot while everyone can see you?
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 20:56

That's what these dudes are basically doing, only worse, because in the food analogy you don't get the extra incentive to keep going from the prestige of being the person with the FEWEST crumbs on his plate or the LEAST amount of liquid in his glass.

In real life such a person would be ridiculed for being poor and a miser.

In videogames he becomes a champion.
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 21:43

And here you can see once more the subhumans' complete and total inability to keep track of several diverging lines of thought at once. They require a categorical imperative, a "ALL OF THIS IS BAD", or "ALL OF THIS IS GOOD", for EVERYTHING:

http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index. ... 0#msg40720

callousfire wrote:The whole thing's a bit silly since the genealogy links to speeddemosarchive.com with the text "the best players ever", even though they're playing for a number that the game doesn't even keep track of...


But there's no contradiction here. The superplayers and speedrunners are INDEED the best players ever (though not the best PLAYER ever, because that, as I explained, can only be me). So there's no mistake in the Genealogy. The difference is that the POINT OF VIDEOGAMES is not to become the BEST IN THE WORLD IN THEM, i.e. to BEAT EVERYONE ELSE AT THEM, but to draw the maximum of pleasure that you can from them FOR YOURSELF. Beating other people has nothing to do with it. Indeed, the entire point in going into a game is to ESCAPE from other people. They are essentially a ceasefire, a place to catch your breath and recuperate. To forget about the outside world in order to stay inside the game as much as possible in order to BEAT THE OTHER PEOPLE WHO HAVE TAKEN REFUGE THERE is utterly retarded -- a last-ditch resort for those who have no hope of ever achieving anything worthwhile outside.

But more of that in future essays. All I wanted to say here is that that subhuman's objection is laughable.
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 21:56

And then they'll reply "But icy you are always going on about how the expert is the only one whose opinion matters on a game, then why are you contradicting the opinions of the superplayers and the speedrunners, even though you admit that, on their particular games of expertise, they are more expert than you?"

BECAUSE CRITICISM IS NECESSARILY COMPARATIVE, AND BEING THE BEST PLAYER IN THE WORLD IN A SINGLE GAME DOES INDEED MAKE YOU THE LEADING EXPERT ON THAT GAME, BUT NOT IN A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF IT IN THE CONTEXT OF SIMILAR GAMES AND VIDEOGAMES AS A WHOLE. These people are therefore better than me at comparing different strategies of play WITHIN A SINGLE GAME, but not in comparing that game NEXT TO MANY OTHER GAMES, get it? Being the best player in the world at Superman 64 does not mean that your view on Superman 64 holds any water -- all it means is that you know better than anyone else how to navigate the possibility space of Superman 64. How hard can that be to grasp?
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 May 2012 21:59

All of this can get really exhausting, and the ironic thing is that, the more explanations I pile up on explanations, the fewer people grasp them :)

And I really haven't even gotten into anything genuinely complicated. Try reading Baudrillard and you'll see!
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 May 2012 01:52

That DJ Orwell kid was saying in an irc channel somewhere some shit about my Ketsui comments, where I said that its scoring system was about "random boxes falling out of nowhere for no apparent reason". He was trying to figure out how to integrate the boxes aesthetically into the game, in some gimmicky way, so as to negate my theory. So, for example, he asked, "And what if the boxes were fuel?" What I take it he meant by this is that you are point-blanking the enemy ships and then staying near them to chain the fuel, so that the fuel goes in your ship. So there you go: aesthetic problem solved, and the game remains unchanged.

But see, it's not just a matter of changing the boxes' color, to look like fuel. That would be a merely gimmicky solution. The point is that this fuel must also be mechanically useful. So you'd have to add another mechanic that would make your ship run out of fuel if you didn't refuel enough, and THEN you'd have a perfectly integrated mechanic. Of course, aesthetically it might still not be perfect, because the whole idea of shooting helicopters in the air and automatically refueling from them is a bit ridiculous, even for a 2D shooting game, but ANY proper mechanical integration of a scoring mechanic is better than none. ANYTHING that makes the reward the game gives you for performing difficult tasks an IN-GAME reward is preferable to an OUT-of-game one.

As in Burnout. The complexifying mechanic must lead deeper into the game.

Or take Rando's comments in the Shmups thread. Where he says that "the score helps the player to see how well he is doing" -- or something to that effect. It's hard to believe that someone as experienced with scoring systems as Rando could make such a mistake. For I might be on the very last stage, just one shot from killing the final boss, while having a LOWER score from someone who just died on the second stage -- so in what way was the score showing us how well we were doing? I was doing better than the aspie all the while having a LOWER score. I finished the goddamn game, and got a cool CONGRATULATIONS screen, whereas the aspie got a screen that said "WHY DON'T YOU TRY HARD NEXT TIME", so there's no question of who was doing better. Essentially, if you have really deeply understood what a scoring system is and how it works, you will have realized that it is IMPOSSIBLE for the score to be an accurate reflection of a player's progress in all but the most primitive of games. Even in something as simple score-wise as R-Type, the moment the player figures out how your scoring system works he can begin min-maxing and milking it, and all idea of the score actually representing anything other than itself goes out the window.

Did you get the last sentence? The score ultimately represents nothing more and nothing less than HOW WELL YOU ARE SCORING, just like IQ tests only reflect how good you are at taking IQ tests, and may or may not have anything to do with your actual intelligence (or even normal school tests, for that matter). Past a certain point, when the player has become, after a shitload of strategizing, etc., very familiar with how your system works, a huge score even indicates the OPPOSITE of progress: the player who pushed himself TO THE VERY EDGE in order to maximize his first stage score will ALMOST CERTAINLY end up DYING IN IT, just as someone who spends his whole time preparing for IQ tests, or studying for school tests with the only object of making the highest grades, without taking any actual interest in the subjects he studies, or extra-curricular activities, will end up a worthless idiot who is simply good at passing tests.

In short, the NATURAL scoring system and the SECONDARY, ANTI-NATURAL one are ultimately DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED -- as I also explained in the essay, but here rephrased some of the arguments, and gave a few more examples, to help along those who are still not fully getting it. The point is that the impetus for doing or not doing things must come FROM THE PLAYER, FROM HIS INSTINCTS, and not from any kind of artificial carrot that is even supposed to be consumed OUTSIDE the game, as with all kinds of heavens and false paradises.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 May 2012 02:13

To be sure, the paradise carrot is by no means illusory, as the secular "scientific" idiots are pleased to think, for the idea of a paradise is just as real as any real carrot, and can be consumed in this world just fine without the need for another one.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 May 2012 02:20

I wrote:Essentially, if you have really deeply understood what a scoring system is and how it works, you will have realized that it is IMPOSSIBLE for the score to be an accurate reflection of a player's progress


Let's try to understand why this is so.

This is so, because you cannot REPRESENT something without ALTERING it. It is so because of quantum mechanics, of how the universe works. There is no perfect mirror, no perfect representation. The closer you bring the mirror, the more you distort the situation. You distract the player, and he ends up looking at the mirror instead of what he's doing. And this is merely in scoring systems meant to do exactly what Rando said they should do: reflect your progress. In scoring systems created with the EXPRESS GOAL of not REPRESENTING your progress but MAKING IT HARDER, HINDERING IT, you can fucking FORGET about representation. It's an entirely different dimension that's making the player do things he'd never have done on his own, just to please you. He's not thinking of himself but of you. Etc. etc.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 May 2012 02:41

Progress in a game should ultimately be its own reward -- that's when pleasure is maximized. How hard can this be for people to grasp?

But the aspies get more pleasure by seeing numbers go up -- why?

Precisely because they are aspies.

They have a far less sensitive aesthetic taste, far less sensitive senses, and hence are satisfied far more by numbers than by other kinds of audiovisual stimuli.

And this is if we disregard the prestige factor entirely.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 May 2012 03:50

And how dumb is Rando's attempt at a rationalization of the scoring system? Why do I need someone looking over my shoulder and telling me "how well I am doing"? What am I, blind? I can see it on the screen!

"He [the score] knows better than you how well you are doing. He can help you improve."

Improve at what? At tricking the scoring system to think that I am better at the game than I really am? At which point we'll need a second scoring system to keep track of the first one, to make sure I am not tricking it. Until, that is, some aspie sits down with a pen and paper for ten years straight and figures out how the second scoring system works so he can fool both of them, which will signal the designer that it's time to implement a third scoring system and so on and so forth to eternity, until some genius down the line realizes THAT ULTIMATELY NO ONE KNOWS BETTER THAN THE INDIVIDUAL OF HOW TO IMPROVE HIMSELF (i.e. how to best enjoy himself), BECAUSE ONLY THE INDIVIDUAL IS (UNCONSCIOUSLY) AWARE OF HIS QUANTUM OF POWER, AND THEREFORE ONLY HE CAN BE THE ULTIMATE AUTHORITY ON HOW TO BEST UTILIZE IT. Not to mention that, since the entire point of art is to MINIMIZE your quantum of power while you are immersed in it, so that you can fantasize that you are doing whatever you want, trying to IMPROVE YOUR SKILLS AT ANYTHING OTHER THAN FANTASIZING WHILE IN THIS MINIMUM POWER CONDITION IS UTTERLY IMBECILIC, AND INDEED A SURE-FIRE SYMPTOM OF POSSESSING AN EXTREMELY SMALL QUANTUM OF POWER, WHICH ARE HENCE ULTIMATELY THE SAME THING.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 May 2012 04:15

This is why I find all scrubs who say that they want "to improve at videogames" ridiculous. I have NEVER in my life CONSCIOUSLY wanted to improve at ANY videogame. Improvement simply happened on its own, as a natural consequence of playing and having a good time. I enjoyed Ketsui just as much in the first few scrubby credits as in the last few, when reaching the last stage. I enjoyed the first few hours of Civilization, when I was stumbling about the interface ignorantly, as the last when I had mastered the game and every other session would end in victory instead of in defeat. Hell, I enjoyed the first moments MORE than the last, and usually, when it was obvious that victory would eventually be attained, I'd quit the game and start over right then and there. Generally, my enjoyment level nosedives as soon as it's become apparent that I am getting the upper hand, that the scales are about to tip in my favor -- for once that point is reached there is nothing more to struggle for and anything that follows is an empty "victory".

Only time I recall that I could have USED some help, but didn't know it, was when I first got into bullet hell games, first with Donpachi, and then Dodonpachi. I was playing the games in MAME on a tated 20" screen I think it was, with a Saturn gamepad, and was getting as far as the third stage or so, but having trouble getting much further. What I could have used back then was someone to tell me that these games were meant to be played on 29 not 20 inch screens, and with a good arcade stick, not a goddamn d-pad. But still, there was no frustration involved at all throughout that experience -- I simply assumed that these were hard games and that I had to play them more to progress in them (which was not by any means a mistaken conclusion, because that's exactly what would have happened if I'd kept playing them that way, only at a much slower pace). But then one day I go to the arcades and try Espgaluda, and after a few credits I figured it out for myself. And since then I play the games the way they were designed to be played, and all has been well.

Anyway, next post will be about Ketsui: Kizuna Jigokutachi -ICYCALM LABEL-
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 May 2012 04:39

So someone should contact that dude who makes the Ketsui romhack versions, and send him a link to the article and copy-paste the relevant posts from this thread, or even the entire thread if the dude has an attention span that can handle it, and get him to make this:

Ketsui: Kizuna Jigokutachi -ICYCALM LABEL-

The idea is simple: you do exactly what I said earlier in the thread: include a rule that gives your ship a fuel bar which is automatically depleted as time goes by, and gets replenished by chaining in the exact same way as you'd chain in the original game, only instead of the reward being a number it is extra fuel. So there will be NO SCORE COUNTER IN THE GAME.

Result:

You need to immediately start chaining or you'll fall out of the sky and won't even get to see the first boss. And the faster the fuel depletion rate, and lower the fuel reward for chaining (which variables will be chosen and fixed by the designer), the more aggressively you'll be required to chain in order not to fall out of the sky and to be ALLOWED to get a crack at the next part/stage etc. of the game.

Make this game and stamp my name all over it and then distribute it online, so that the goddamn aspies can see IN PRACTICE what I am talking about, because they are obviously too dense to understand the theory. So they can see that I am by no means advocating DUMBING THE GAMES DOWN, as they think, but THE EXACT OPPOSITE, and that THEIR version of the game will be a fucking SISSY one compared to mine, because in mine VANILLA SURVIVAL PLAY WILL NOT EVEN BE POSSIBLE. Or, more accurately, survival play WILL BE THE ONLY THING THAT'S POSSIBLE, but MY survival play will be ABSOLUTELY BRUTAL.

Of course the whole business will be far less effective now, that everyone has ALREADY played Ketsui and gone through all the stages, so the incentive to struggle against ICYCALM LABEL will be far less than if this was a brand-new Cave shooter with aesthetics no one had seen before. So the aspies, who have the abstraction and conceptualizing prowess of a FROG will not be able to see the FULL GENIUS AND BEAUTY of my approach, but perhaps it will at least help them to stop bleating that I am trying to dumb down "their" games (the scare quotes are because these games are by no means "theirs", since I am the one who understands best how to best appreciate them).

And of course there will be the slightly jarring aesthetic of boxes replenishing your fuel supply, but this cannot be helped by a romhack, and we'd have to design a brand new skin (a la Ikaruga, etc.), if we wanted the game to be aesthetically perfect, but like I said this is merely a practical demonstration of my theory and not an attempt to one-up Hiroshi Iuchi.

The end result will be a game just as complex as Ketsui BUT EVEN HARDER THAN IT (especially if the designer is too evil with the fuel depletion rate, etc.), where moreover the payoff for skilled play will not be a retarded number BUT AWESOME FUCKING AESTHETICS (i.e. the next stage, or the next part of a stage, etc.)

So please someone hunt this guy down and get it done. Perhaps one day we could make ICYCALM LABELS of all Cave games, and send them to Ikeda so that maybe he can finally get a clue.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 May 2012 14:27

And what would happen to Giga Wing -ICYCALM LABEL-? Would it be better or worse than vanilla Giga Wing?

The proper integration of the scoring mechanics into the game basically increases the focus on them, because the player can no longer choose to ignore them. If they were great to begin with, integrating them into the game will make it that much better; if they were crap they will destroy it. In scoring games the designer can afford to add a mediocre scoring system, just for the sake of having it and appeasing all the dudes who demand scoring, but in a fully integrated game he can't be that carefree. And since the point of an extra mechanic, ANY extra mechanic, is to make the game more complex, and hence more difficult, properly integrating a scoring mechanic means you need to make DAMN SURE your aesthetics are top notch, otherwise you risk losing the player to prettier, even if shallower, games.

I mean, imagine Ketsui -ICYCALM LABEL-'s scoring system in something like Eschatos or the Triangle Service games. Only Rob would end up bothering with them (because he's practically blind and deaf).

With Giga Wing it's a bit better, because I genuinely find its scoring system more fun than Ketsui's, so the ugliness of the world would perhaps be counterbalanced by the extra fun of the mechanics. But at that point the games are not even directly comparable any more, because they belong to different genres. Giga Wing played for score (and especially at a high level) is no longer a shooting game, any more than Dangun Feveron or Ikaruga or Triggerheart Exelica. These are just action-puzzle games with STG-inspired aesthetics, and are therefore in the long run on a lower level than pure STGs of Ketsui's caliber, because the shooting genre is by definition more fun than the action-puzzle one. (Which explains why STGs have such a hardcore following compared to action-puzzlers. That's not to say THERE ARE NO HARDCORE ACTION-PUZZLE PLAYERS -- that's to say there are FAR FEWER of them, indicating that, as far as mankind is concerned, aesthetics that make sense are more immersive than abstract, non-sensical ones. This also shows up the aspies' lack of self-understanding: if mechanics REALLY mattered to them more than aesthetics, they would be far more into action-puzzlers than STGs, since the mechanical possibilities in the former are orders of magnitude greater, because they are not burdened by aesthetic restrictions. But aesthetics DO INDEED MATTER, hence why the STG genre has had such a cult following since day 1, whereas the action-puzzle one is the domain of women and others with no imagination).
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 May 2012 14:41

Essentially, the more complexity you cram into the STG genre, the more difficult it is to maintain aesthetic coherence, and you begin verging into abstract puzzle territory. Think of a bow whose bowstring you pull back further and further. The pullback distance is complexity and the tension in the string is aesthetic coherence. The more you pull back the string the stronger you have to be to pull it further back (i.e. the smarter you have to be to keep complexifying the mechanics), and the more force is being applied on the string at the ends of the bow (i.e. the greater the demands on the world for aesthetic coherence). Past a certain point you go beyond the tensile capacity of the string (or whatever the proper mechanical term is; the last time I studied this stuff was in '97), and the string breaks. Anything that happens after the string breaks is action-puzzle nonsense that has nothing to do with videogames and the artform is over -- you might as well be playing ping-pong or darts at that point.

And what determines the tensile capacity of the string?

The game's genre.

If you want to keep pulling past a certain string's breaking point, you have to replace it with a stronger string -- i.e. a higher genre.

Which is why it's so much easier to complexify a 3D shooting game (i.e. Wing Commander, or X-Wing or whatever), than a 2D one, while maintaining aesthetic coherence.
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