The Packbats' Weblog

Gaming and the Golden Record is a compilation of tiny video essays on the theme of the Voyager Golden Record, each answering the question: if you could package up videogames on a golden record to send out into the universe, as a communication to people who don't know anything about Earth about what we people on Earth are like, what would you send? We have issues with some of the responses - a little blatant fat-negativity, a little casual amatonormativity (assuming romance is for everyone here) - but it was interesting and the question was interesting: what do you send?

Our first thought was a game we loved and loved the plot of, pretty unsurprisingly - one that has things to say about who we are, what our social structures are like, what motivates us, what kind of injustices happen ... but we stopped, and we thought, and we decided that a story next to a game just wouldn't work, however well told. Every story is full of gaps, assumptions about what people will infer and therefore shouldn't be said, and if all you have is handfuls of words, there's so little to help you find what you're missing in them.

And on that note, shouldn't we try to help them understand us? There's going to be loads of stories on this, a lot of which will probably take for granted an understanding of our ordinary. Maybe we should include a game about that ordinary - give them "Gone Home" and let them pick up books and pens and cassette tapes and turn them over and around in their hands, or give them "The Long Dark" with bodily needs to be taken care of in a world physical enough that exertion keeps you warm and different species of wood burn differently, or give them one of The Sims games and let them watch the characters seek to fulfill their bodily and social needs both.

...we probably shouldn't give a group of people who, we presume, will tear apart the few records they have of an alien civilization for every atom of information it can give them ... a game with easy-to-find glitches that break things as a guide to what normal is. We don't want them to think the most efficient form of human locomotion is backwards long jumping. We probably also don't want to give them a game quite so cisheteronormative.

So ... screw it, "Stay?" by ejadelomax.

"Stay?" is a choice-based text adventure. You act by clicking links, not by pushing joysticks - the extent to which you can glitch out the story is probably near zero. ("Stay?" also deals with abuse, body horror, and violence, so be prepared for that kind of thing. Also food and alcohol, incidentally.) "Stay?" is a story about being a person interacting with people - about lying in bed the morning after failing at the task you were trying to achieve, about deciding who to spend time with in school, about asking your friends for help, about leaving everything behind and walking off into the mountains to go be somewhere else for a while, about mysteries and secrets and turning over every metaphorical stone in your hands until you understand enough about the situation to do something about it. "Stay?" stuck with us for hours after we played it, grieving our choices.

It's a whole lot of words - a whole lot of details, for everything it glosses over - even if it doesn't have images to help you interpret what the words are describing. But it has words, it has the specificity and perspective that words make explicit, assuming we send their readers enough dictionaries and encyclopedias to understand them. It has choices for you to make, and reactions for you to have to them. (I love abstract expressions of meaning, but ambiguity is not so helpful here.) It's not everything we want - there's a dating sim component to it, even if it lets you turn someone down and remain the closest of friends, and we're sure that there's not gonna be much aro representation in the collection - but ... but screw it. I want a story that doesn't apologize for queerness on the disc, and I want a story that talks about war and suffering and injustice, and I want a story you can spend hours pulling apart to try to understand, and a story that matters a lot to us and we want to share.

We don't have an answer for this one, but it's kind of interesting to us: a lot of the games that we play a lot in a zoning-out or while-listening-to-something-else way are:

• Short games
• with a significant strategy element
• but so much luck that we often just lose without recourse.

Solitaire games are like this. Minesweeper is like this. A lot of deckbuilding games are like this. "Forward" by Christophe Coyard is like this. "Castle Defense" by watabou is like this. These are games we can win if we play well enough and don't get screwed over by luck, but that we lose a lot because we do get screwed over by luck. (In Cards with Personalities, we're sitting at a 56% win rate after literally thousands of games.)

...it's probably, like, a random reinforcement thing. We know what to do but we don't know if we'll get rewarded, so the reward feels bigger when it happens.

We're not playing any games that try to get money out of the players, though.

Noticing more posts on here than in the past - I think we're maybe gonna make another push to incorporate Dreamwidth into our regular Internet habits.

Some updates since - *checks* - a month ago:

• We started reading "Musicking the meanings of performing and listening" by Christopher Small after rewatching an Adam Neely video where he quotes from it. We're semi-liveblogging it in a Discord group chat we're in; we should probably make a full post about it. (2021-01-02: Followup post on Muskcing here.)
• We finally broke out the MIDI controller keyboard we got for our birthday, installed LMMS, and started trying to make music with it. We haven't gotten super far but we did post one track to our dragon.style account.
• We made a performance-presentation of-about La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 #7 in PICO-8 and put it online.
• We stayed up later than we planned playing a fantasy text adventure story about ... I guess the page says second chances? called "Stay?" and spent a long while full of feels about it and our choices.
• We also read a Bitsy essay about sourdough bread that was full of good tangents, called "Bread Minus".

...idk. It's hard to remember what happened, but those things happened.

We'll try to be around.

There are few tools as good as photography at documenting what is there. The camera almost inevitably captures an enormous wealth of detail in that span of time when it admits light into its lens - photography can record the visual element of history with incredible speed, accuracy, and fidelity. This is something to be celebrated.

...but the capturing of images with a camera does not cease to be photography when it is used to other ends.

( 550 words, including mention of food )

- 🐲

We just played through "Escort Yourself Out", an autobiographical game about dealing with triggers that was part of the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality on itch.io.

The way itch.io is structured assumes that what you do when you play a game is that you rate the experience afterwards.

...ratings on a scale from one to five stars feels like the wrong framing for conversation about this game. It was worthwhile to us to play and stars are not how we'd talk about that.

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to you as a great fan of Test Drive Unlimited for two reasons: first, to thank you for making such a great game, and second, to suggest a few things I noticed that could make it even better.

Before I say anything else, I want to say that TDU is probably my favorite videogame of all time. The driving physics feel realistic without being unmanageable, the fleet of available cars is extensive and well-crafted, the traffic AI is beautifully implemented, and the variety of missions and challenges is enough to satisfy anyone. Most importantly, the major selling point of the game - the freedom to simply drive anywhere on the network of roads covering the island of Oahu - simply works; in contrast to previous games (such as GTA: Vice City), only the rarest of hiccups interrupt one's drive.

I would say that there are only three things to which I must direct your attention. I am sure you are well aware of the corresponding issues, but I will mention them nonetheless.

First, I notice that the game seems to have been designed with the outside-the-car cameras in mind. I don't really object to this - I know many people like to play that way - but I've noticed that when I am using the inside-the-car camera I (a) can't see traffic lights when I stop at the intersection and (b) can't turn the camera quickly to look in directions away from where I'm going. These aren't game-breaking issues, but it would be cool if the team could spend a little more time on them.

Second, the classification system for the cars is somewhat unsatisfactory. For example, in Class G, the Mercedes Gullwing is much slower than the Pontiac Firebird, which is much slower than the Lamborghini Miura, which is much slower than the Shelby Daytona. In the other classes, too, several assignments are dubious (e.g. the TVR T440R as C instead of A). Adding a numerical rating system like in Forza 2 would be able to capture these details more clearly (although even in Forza 2 the Porsche 914 was underrated). It would also support the addition of a more complicated tuning system, like in the Forza and Gran Turismo series.

Third, there's no way to tell whether another human car is a fair challenge for you before you challenge them except by knowing all the models. Again, the numerical system could help with this: for example, an identical opponent could be displayed with a white halo (like the health indications in Left 4 Dead), and the halo could fade towards pink and red for faster opponents and toward gray and black for slower. (I chose these colors arbitrarily - if you have better ideas, please ignore them.)

Thank you for your time and trouble,
Robin Zimmermann

P.S. I just finished all the missions to get "Ace" rank in TDU!