uh… suddenly my mind has gone blank. That’s not a great way to start a writing but you gotta start somewhere I guess. I just watched a little video on the legal ramifications of storming Area 51 and it’s not like Area 51 is a boring concept but honestly, it’s been done to death. I have this idea about potential settings for stories. There are Carry Settings that are difficult to mess up. A Carry is something that allows everything else to be good. It’s so strong that the rest of it just sort of falls into place. You can think of a Quarter Back as a Carry position on the field while the a Wide Receiver is a Skill position and a Coach is a Support position. Anyway, there are certain settings that are so well suited to stories that they kind of carry a story. They make a story interesting even when the writing and plot aren’t that great.
A good example of a Carry Setting would be Submarines or old timey sailing ships. All of your characters are trapped together on an island with a very clear chain of command and status. You can have high degrees of variance in your characters between passengers, officers, and crew. You can introduce any sort of conflict you want whether that’s the weather or opposing ships or conflict on the main ship. There’s an automatic feeling of fear and dread inherent in the setting provided by the ocean and the isolation. The veneer of society is fragile as well with that kind of isolation and that is always a great source of story. On top of the story freedom and all that there is also the fact that sailing ships are bad ass. Sailing combat is a fantastic mix of very slow paced waiting, which is a good thing for a story since you can get all the reactions to choices made by either ship, and also fast paced combat where cannon balls are destroying everything and people are jumping from ship to ship. Clearly, Sailing vessels are a powerful Carry Setting.
One Carry Setting that is way over used is the Post Apocalypse setting. Post apocalypse is a fantastically high potential setting. You, as the writer can create any sort of rules you want. Do you want to avoid having to be realistic? You can say aliens attacked and now their technology left behind after the big war is being incorporated into human technology and boom, you can do whatever you want. You can have groups be isolated or you can have them be close to each other. The veneer of society is even less likely to be present in post apocalypse so that gives you more freedom. If you want to make it scary that can be done easily. You can have mysterious forbidden zones that can’t be accessed because of radiation. You can kind of do whatever you want. Unfortunately the most common thing people do with post apocalypse is just to do the same thing every one is doing, at least in how the story and setting feel. There are post apocalypse tropes that people seem to be unable to get away from.
On the other hand there are setting that are the opposite of Carry Settings. I’m not sure what to call these yet. This would be something like a movie based on Medieval Realism. Creating a good movie set in Medieval times is not easy. Obviously it can be done and it has been done but it sure as shit ain’t as easy as post apocalypse. Basically in medieval times everything is shitty for all your characters at the start and more than likely everything is still gonna be shitty for your characters at the end since the Medieval period is kind of just shitty for everyone at all times no matter how much money you have or anything else. Even being a king is shitty because if you get sick there’s no medicine and there’s no education or quality parenting going on so even the royalty have shitty lives because they hate everyone. Obviously the peasants have shitty lives, that goes without saying.
John is talking to me right now. He won’t shut up. He is a poopy butt face poop face. John says Overwatch, the game I was about to play, is stupid and of course, he is correct. The game is terribly designed. There’s this thing where team based games have the most variance between good feeling and bad feeling. What I mean with that is that the feeling of power and fun and excitement you get when everyone is playing well and intelligently and everyone is working together on both teams is amazing. It can be the funnest thing to do. Obviously, team based competitions can feel incredibly rewarding. The problem is that any time you don’t have a great game you have a horrible game. It’s like 10% of your games are amazing and you pop off afterwards and your adrenaline is running high as you move perfectly with your teammates and everyone is on the same page and the match is a close game. Saying that 90% of the games are terrible might seem like an over statement but it really isn’t. Let’s first lay down the frw things needed to be able to operate as a team. The first thing is communication. Throughout history communication has been a vastly powerful tool in warfare and even economics so, of course, it is incredibly important when competing in a team based game. The other thing you need is intelligence. You need to be able to predict what your teammates will do and what your enemies will do. You need to be able to recognize an opportunity when it presents itself and also be able to analyze how likely it is for your teammates to also notice that opportunity and take advantage of it. If you see an enemy player out on his own and vulnerable you need to think about if your teammates are seeing the same thing. If you go off on your own than you are just making yourself as vulnerable as the guy you’re chasing. You need to pay attention to when your teammates and opponents use tools available to them so that you know when you should use your own tools. These are the two key factors in having quality team play. The only other factor that dictates your performance is your hand eye coordination and this, as well, compounds the problem.
Now let’s talk about where and how clear these factors exist in Overwatch. For the very perceptive of you all I have to tell you is that Overwatch is a game played by teenagers and you already know how this is gonna go but there are compounding issues here. Since it is a video game you either have to play the game with completely random people selected out of the pool of people who play the game or, you have to get a group of friends together to play as a team. Any one over the age of 20 probably understands that getting 5 of your friends to all be into the same thing and have free time at the same time as each other so that you can all get together is impossible. Ain’t nobody got time for that shit. People are busy when they grow up. How the heckers man? I lived with my best friend last year and we still only really hung out once a week at most because we both have jobs and relationships and different interests. How am I, a 28 year old introverted adult, gonna get 5 other people that I like all together to play a video game that I actually think is a pretty shitty video game? I wouldn’t even recommend the game to any of my friends. All this is to say that I play with random people and the vast majority of people do the same. Next, I bet you can imagine the type of people that fill out the population of the game.
Who do you think plays this stuff? Young people play this stuff. I play it because I like letting my brain go crazy and try and analyze lots of incoming data at the same time. I play the game very rarely since it sucks but I do play it some times. The vast majority of the player base is children. That isn’t to that the majority people in middle school. Like I said in a previous post, “Child” is a distinction that can be applied to anyone of any age and believe me the people who play video games are highly likely to be children. I’m not saying that video games as a medium is for children or that being an adult means never playing video games. What I am saying is that the statistical majority of players are children from a maturity and intellectual level. If you think I’m being harsh than you clearly have never played this game or other games like it like League of Legends where everyone is just pissed off 24/7 and also everyone is anonymous. Anonymity is an incredibly powerful thing that vastly changes how most people think and act. Anonymity can turn decent people into monsters as easily as any hardcore drug. I also think of anonymity as an addictive substance but that’s a conversation for a different time. The addictive nature of anonymity could be an entire book. It could be an entire series of college courses. Let’s avoid discussing it at length and just define it quickly in how it pertains to video games. The quick and simple way to define how anonymity affects video game players is this; it makes them all assholes. This is a fucking fact. Anyone who plays these games either agrees with this statement or shows themselves as innocently delusional.
So combine a bunch of angry children into a team based game where nobody plays with a group and also nobody ever communicates and I think you can imagine how fucking awful it can be. If you wanted to design a system and competitive sport for the sole purpose of providing the most frustrating experience possible you could not do a better job than Riot games did when they designed League of Legends or the job Blizzard did when they designed Overwatch.
I’m tired of writing about this. If you are wondering why I still play a game that I so well understand I don’t have a very good answer. I go into it every time with a mental attitude that only a tiny percentage of the player base is mature enough to have. I go in knowing that I’m gonna lose alot and I’m totally capable of having fun despite whatever experience the people around me are having. I guess the real nail in the coffin for the game is that mechanical skill, so aiming and shooting, are all very difficult and still important. What this means is that your intelligence, maturity level, and desire for fun, do not, in nearly any significant way, dictate you competitive ranking. What this means is that I, since I suck at aiming and hitting things due to poor hand speed, play with people who are in the middle level of skill rankings and you can imagine the variety of angry people that make up this section.
John started me on this dumb topic so he’s to blame for this diatribe. Also diatribe is a awesome word that is going on my list of great words. That’s right I have a list of great words and maybe one day you’ll see it.
I’m tired now.
The Mind of Joshypoo 