Page 6 of Looking for Group
Apparently her mother was a graphic artist and her dad was some kind of Oxford don, and she was here at De Montfort pursuing her bliss.
Which was the sort of thing she actually said.
That just left Andy, from Drew’s ultimate Frisbee team, and Stephanie, known as Steff (or Smidge if Sanee was talking to her) who was here on a nursing and midwifery course.
She and Sanee had been inseparable since fresher’s week.
They were very slightly unspeakable, and right now rubbing noses and sharing a basket of curly fries.
“Sorry I’m late, guys.” Drew grabbed a stool from a nearby table and squished in between Sanee and Tinuviel. “Instance overran.”
Sanee pulled away from Steff and made the loser sign.
“You know only losers do that, right?” asked Drew.
“A loser is well-placed to recognise loseriness in others. You need to play some proper games, man. Not ones where you kill the same stupid wizard every week for six months.”
Drew rolled his eyes. “It’s about mastering the fight. You don’t go up to Man United and say, ‘Why are you playing Liverpool again, you played them last season?’”
“Mate, it’s a game, not a sport. A game should be a self-contained experience that does what it needs to do without wasting your fucking time.”
“What, you mean like Dishonored ?” 2
“Okay, what was wrong with Dishonored ? And if you say it was too short, I’ll punch you.”
“You see.” Steff grinned at them. “Video games do make you violent.”
“Too short, too easy, Blink, Dark Vision, Shadow Kill: game over.” Drew stole one of their fries. “Also, it’s from like 2012.”
Sanee had that outraged look, meaning a serious lecture was on the way.
“So not the point. Dishonored is totally a designer’s game.
What it does is create a space and give the player total freedom to interact with that space.
If the player decides to take the easy option, then the player doesn’t get to whinge about the game being too easy.
And it’s still relevant today because nothing has done that since 3 . ”
“So what you’re saying,” said Drew, “is that the designers didn’t bother to balance their gameplay properly and that’s somehow my problem. The game has to provide the challenge, not the player. Don’t give me an ‘I win’ button and then have a go at me for pressing it.”
Tinuviel waved her burger in the air, scattering iceberg lettuce and bits of tomato over the table.
“What I thought was really interesting about Dishonored was its embrace of found narrative. Mission objectives are delivered through dialogue, but story is inherent in the world and emerges with the player’s visual engagement with the environment.
So where I look and what I see creates the story for me.
But where you look and what you see creates the story for you. ”
Drew suspected Andy had a bit of a thing for Tinuviel because he’d been listening with a kind of rapt look. “Oh wow,” he breathed, “that’s really fascinating.”
“Yeah, I know. Isn’t it?” She smiled. “It’s similar to what I find so compelling about Twine, the way story is constructed not just through words but through text.” 4
Drew and Sanee sighed in stereo. But where Drew would have let it go, Sanee, well, didn’t. He took a deep breath. “In the twenty-first century, making a text-only game is like shooting a film in black and white. The only reason to do it is to make things look artsier.”
“Oh my God.” Drew pulled back as much as he could, given the space. “They’re having the Interactive Fiction discussion. Everyone take cover.”
Steff clung to Sanee. “Don’t kill my Squidge.”
“I love you, Smidge.” Sanee snuggled into her.
And Andy made gag face. “No, please, kill him. Put us out of our misery.”
“I’m going to take the paragon option,” said Tinuviel serenely.
Drew couldn’t resist. “Renegade interrupt.” 5 He threw a chip at her.
She ate the chip. “The most important thing to remember about Twine is that it makes game design accessible to anyone, no matter who they are or where they come from.”
“If,” interrupted Sanee, “they’ve got a computer, an internet connection, and free time to spend faffing around with indie games.”
“That’s still the lowest barrier to entry out there. It’s free, it takes seconds to download, it’s visual and very straightforward, and you can start using it immediately.”
This was an old argument and never went anywhere or ended well, so Drew sort of tuned out. He wasn’t a big fan of IF—he’d once told Tinuviel he thought it was basically reading, and that hadn’t ended well either.
With no burger in sight, his mind drifted back to his new guild.
Anni had been a big part of his life for three years, and it was amazing how quickly it had gone away.
Except maybe it wasn’t really because the whole thing was built on pixels.
After he’d gquit, he’d thought some of his ex-guildies might have whispered him or messaged him or something, but nobody had.
And it was stupid to be so upset, because it was just a video game.
It wasn’t like it was real life or they were real friends. 6
His real friends were squabbling about minority voices in interactive media. At least, two of them were. Andy was watching awkwardly, and Steff was stuffing chips in Sanee’s mouth in an effort to keep him quiet.
“So,” said Drew, as a harassed-looking waiter plonked his food down in front of him, “how did you guys find Dragon Age: Inquisition ?” 7
Sanee rolled his eyes. “I skipped it because the only press release I could remember was about how the sex would be mature and tasteful. Which I thought was a pile of Molyneux.”
“Actually”—Tinuviel leaned across the table—“I was pleasantly surprised by that. It seems like BioWare finally realised that the best way to represent sex in a video game is not to have stiffly animated underwear sequences. But I agree it sounded like Molyneux at the time.”
Steff made a confused noise. “Sorry, what’s a Molyneux?”
“Molyneux,” explained Sanee, “noun, a promise made for an upcoming video game which you can’t keep and which no one would be able to recognise even if you did.”
Drew spoke round a mouthful of burger. “Like trees that grow in real time in Fable 1 . Or the game teaching you the meaning of love in Fable 2 .”
“Ooh,” said Tinuviel. “Wasn’t Fable 3 supposed to know what the weather was like where you were, and set the weather in game to match?”
Andy smiled hopefully at Tinuviel. “I hear Fable 4 will come with a special headset and the weather in the game will be controlled by your brain.”
From then on ideas flew thick and fast around the table.
“In Fable 5 , if you get married in the game, you get married in real life. To Peter Molyneux.”
“In Fable 6 , the game will be able to sense if you’re not enjoying it and will ask you what’s wrong.”
“ Fable 7 will cure cancer.”
“ Fable 8 is Luke’s father.”
“ Fable 9 was dead the whole time.” 8
“ Fable 10 will be Half-Life 3 .”
“So,” asked Steff, when they’d finished laughing, eating, and insulting an innocent game designer, “what are we doing this afternoon?”
Drew was having fun, but part of him really wanted to get back to Heroes of Legend .
It was kind of important to make a good impression on a new guild, and a little part of him was hoping Solace would still be online.
But if he ditched his real-life friends for an MMO, they’d never let him hear the end of it.
“Well, I don’t know, Smidge. How about what we do every Saturday afternoon. Go back to ours and play board games.” Sanee grinned at them. “We’ve just got Space Alert.”
Tinuviel clapped her hands. “Brilliant, I played that with my parents at Christmas. We had one game where my dad went the wrong way really early on and spent the rest of the game walking into a wall, trying to launch missiles.”
Drew finished the rest of his pint. “Sorry, your dad did what? What game is this?”
“Space Alert.” She thought for a moment. “It’s like RoboRally on a timer in space with sound effects.”
“Oh, why didn’t you say? I’m in.”
One game of Space Alert led to another, and then another, and eventually—when they’d all got bored about being blown up by space amoeba—into pizza. Then they ended up watching Drive Angry , which Sanee had bought for ￡2.99 in the HMV closing-down sale. 9
“Well,” said Drew when they finished, “that wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen.”
Andy had claimed the beanbag in the corner. “It wasn’t even the worst Nicolas Cage movie I’ve ever seen.”
Which inspired a long and heated discussion about what the worst Nicolas Cage movie was, and whether the badness of a Nicolas Cage movie could be rated at all because, as Sanee pointed out, sometimes Cage at his worst was Cage at his best. 10
With one thing and another, it was after midnight by the time Drew rocked back to his room.
He should probably have gone to bed so he could get up at a reasonable time tomorrow and do some work on his project, but he wasn’t feeling that tired and he wanted to get in a couple of dungeons before the weekly badge limits rolled over.
He logged into his bank alt and checked his auctions, about half of which had sold and about half of which had come back to him because some git was flooding the market with cut-price gems. If he was really lucky, one of the other gem crafters would buy them out and repost, but he couldn’t be arsed to do it himself. He hopped onto Ella.
[Guild][Orcarella]: Hi
[Guild][Morag]: wb
[Guild][Solace]: Evening
[Guild][Heurodis]: yo
[Guild][Morag]: how’s it going?
[Guild][Orcarella]: good, just been hanging out
[Guild][Heurodis]: we just knocked over bloodrose
[Guild][Orcarella]: anything good drop
[Guild][Heurodis]: maidens ring from br
[Guild][Morag]: everybody lol *sigh*
[Guild][Heurodis]: woeful gauntlets from CoT
[Guild][Heurodis]: and the net from Vilicus
[Guild][Caius]: *does happy dance*