It's Tuesday, March 15 2022. We had a late start today -- I'm going to blame the combination of the time change with doing the school run -- which meant I started this in the morning and am having to finish it in the late afternoon. It didn't rain much.
\nEven shorter bullet points today:
\nI have a short, not-quite developed thought/thing that caught my attention based on starting the latest game in Red Dead Redemption: Grand Theft Robot Dinosaur[3], a.k.a. Horizon: Forbidden West, the sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn.
\nAs briefly as I can, Horizon: Forbidden West follows the story of Aloy, the savior of humanity in a way that even Michael Burnham would concede is somewhat suspicious, as she succeeds in beating off one existential threat at the conclusion of the first game, Horizon: Zero Dawn, to learning about yet another existential threat at the beginning of the sequel.
\nAnyway: I had a fairly atypical experience, because I didn't finish Horizon: Zero Day [sic] when it came out in 2017. Instead, I played through and finished it a couple weeks ago, doing it all in one go before starting Horizon: Pet Shop Boys. Which led to this super weird dynamic -- you end Zero Dawn at the height of your powers. You have all the upgrades, all the weapons, all the body armor, everything you need to go pew pew pew shooty robot dinosaur with your bow, you can use your long pointy USB stick and plug it into the exposed port of any robot dinosaur to zero day it and then ride around, like it's some sort of horsey you've grand thefted.
\nAnd then, for me at least, the next day you start Horizon: Journey To The West and your character has the equivalent of nothing. You don't have your stuff. You don't have your armor. You have to learn how to climb all over again, and, inexplicably, the ladders work differently.
\nNow look, I'm kind of making fun here in that some of these issues (ladders working differently) are, OK, environmental level design issues and they're allowable in the grand scheme of suspension of disbelief because you're playing a videogame where you have a magic USB stick and autorun.inf still exists.
\nBut I think this is a problem with most chronological sequels. Note: I think. I remember Mass Effect dealing with this in terms of importing your previous character, but that was more like importing your previous character's choices and so on for a more role-playing, narrative-based game. Mainly because Mass Effect had a great way of dealing with this if you didn't have a previous save to import, through the fiction of having to reconstruct corrupted data.
\nPragmatically, you've got the problem that most (many) of the players of the sequel, if you've done a good job, are coming to it cold, and you don't want the game to suck for them. So you have to make sure you go through some sort of intro/tutorial sequence. And most people won't be coming into your game having directly finished the previous game either, because I admit that I am weird in this case.
\nAnd yet, we do have a trend for videogames to support something called New Game+, where you get to start over after finishing, with a bunch of your stuff, on the general premise that 'having more stuff' and 'being able to do more things' more or less can correlate with 'have fun'.
\nSo. I'm idly thinking about how you balance new players and onboarding again with the tension of narrative continuity, i.e. the "what the hell, what happened to my stuff?" problem.
\nYour reminder - later this week, subscribers and supporters will be getting a link to Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1, collecting the best bits of the first 50 episodes. (You'll still get the link if you subscribe after this week, don't worry).
\nYesterday I got enough of Gumroad figured out to hook up the product page and code for free downloads, plus did some debugging (ugh) of the epub version and tried to figure out what/how the Kindle .mobi version works. Scrivener says you'll be getting just under 42,000 words worth, or, if you trust the reading time calculation, nearly 3 hours of "content enjoyment".
\nAs always, you can [subscribe at a pay-what-you-want level]({{ subscribe_url }}).
\nOkay, that's it! It's the end of Tuesday? How was yours?
\nBest,
\nDan
\nUrbina, F., Lentzos, F., Invernizzi, C. et al. Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery. Nat Mach Intell (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9 ↩︎
\n"Someone just attempted to send a fax to my cell phone... and it worked? 😯\nMy voicemail actually accepted it, and alerted me of a two page fax (which I deleted without looking.) Is this some kind of a new phishing spam attack on a feature nobody knows exists?" @dosnostalgic ↩︎
\nIn our horse, we call Red Dead Redemption "Grand Theft Horsey" because it is made by the same studio that developed the Grand Theft Auto series, and because it has horses in it. My in-laws are stereotypical midwestern farmers-ish, and I have a memory of my father-in-law, who I would say was about average at hunting and not, say, extreme about hunting, finding me going around doing random hunting in Red Dead quite funny. ↩︎
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