Still playing Breath of the Wild

[conuly]

Also, incidentally, thinking about Ender's Game, some. At one point in the book, Ender breaks the unbeatable computer game by using lateral thinking and a surprising, even for Battle School, penchant for utterly unnecessary viciousness. Nobody had ever done this before or since, and unlike real world games this one doesn't merely glitch out, it ascends to a higher plane.

Back to Zelda, here's a YouTube video of somebody who has very determinedly gotten to Zora Domain without meeting the Zora prince - the devs anticipated that somebody might try this, and adapted the dialog to account for this improbable feat.

There are videos of people luring Hinoxes, not found near water, all the way out to water to see if they can swim (yes), of dragging Cuccos around so that monsters get swarmed by flocks, and of luring Bokoblins into disturbing maze traps. (Some of the people on the last group belong on some sort of watchlist, I swear.) People have patiently induced Guardians to fight Lynels, snuck weapons into a weaponless challenge, and generally done everything they could to break this game, as I'm sure they habitually try to break all games they play.

There is a lot you can say about Ender's Game, much of it critical. I think, however, that the most important takeaway here is that OSC clearly didn't know the sort of people who played video games.

Comments

[sholio]

As a point of curiosity, though, how much of a thing was that with teens/preteens in the Atari/arcade era? I'm certainly not saying nobody ever did it, but when games were things that you had to play in small adult-supervised doses or shell out your own pocket money to play for a few minutes, there was way more incentive to play it to beat the game rather than playing it to break it. It was fun to push the boundaries of the game, but when you were shelling out quarters to run a maze, there wasn't THAT much incentive to see what happened if you tried to break the maze unless you had more time and more quarters than you knew what to do with.

There's a lot of legit critical stuff you can say about Ender's Game, but OSC not anticipating what gamer culture would be like 10 years later, when young adults had endless unsupervised playtime to explore the game, doesn't seem entirely fair.

(On the other hand maybe I'm just unfairly extrapolating from what my friends and I were like circa-arcade-era, and there was actually a lot more of that going on than I was aware of at the time.)

[alexseanchai]

...I just had to check and it turns out Ender's Game is four years older than I am.

Anyway isn't "break the game in all possible ways" the test players' job? What's getting me right now is apparently that game didn't have creative test players.

(I mean also iirc what happened when Ender broke the game is Jane took over entertaining him with it? Which I will not fault the game devs for failing to anticipate!)

[conuly]

Okay, but his argument is that Ender is both smarter and more creative than all his peers AND more specially aggressive/determined, nevermind that the entire school is selected to have all four of those traits. Somebody else would've come up with his solution, or another one just as gorily creative.

[havocthecat]

Somebody else would've come up with his solution, or another one just as gorily creative.

You're so not wrong. Gamers really do love to work together.

The thing is that I really wonder if OSC has yet to see a determined group of creative gamer folks come together and say, "OK, sure, we can break the game separately it this way solo, but if we work together, I bet we can break it really, really explosively. WHICH IS MORE FUN."

I think he got caught up in One True Heroing. It was a common fault in books of that era.

[conuly]

I think he got caught up in One True Heroing. It was a common fault in books of that era.

Random question: Have you seen the Ender = Hitler analysis?

[havocthecat]

I have, but not in a long time, so I don't remember the details. It's kind of hard to do an exact map on that other than the genocide part, if I recall correctly.

[conuly]

IIRC, the full analysis points out that there are some really creepy parallels between Young!Hitler and Young!Ender, though it can't quite *prove* that this was done intentionally it sure as hell looks weird.

[shy_magpie]

lmao <3

[calimac]

This strikes me as similar to the phenomenon whereby, if you ask people to name a boat, they'll call it Boaty McBoatface.

[conuly]

And be immensely displeased when the powers that be say NO.

[grav_ity]

Me: Yes, good, yes, I like where this is going.
Me: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH SUCK IT CARD

sorry. i will be a grown up now.

THIS IS FASCINATING.

I have recently started playing video games, and I am REALLY bad at it, so when it came to The Last Big Fight in Dragon Age Origins, I literally stood behind a ballistae, which never ran out of ammo and aimed itself, and hit the Big Bad 80 billion times until it died. I didn't get a scratch on me, didn't land a single strike, got credit for the kill, and my companions only entered the fight when one of the flunkies got close to us. It was amazing.

[havocthecat]

Lol. :)

Who cares how good or bad at it you are if you have fun? I'm on my fifty thousandth playthrough of TitanQuest and I finally hit on a strategy that lets me munchkin my way through.

Also I get to kill monsters.

But I do need a better shield.

AND YOU PLAYED SMART AT THE END AND THAT'S THE IMPORTANT THING.

[conuly]

Sounds like you're really GOOD at it.

[havocthecat]

Only sometimes. My first build was TERRIBLE. My second and third were worse. I hit a couple good strategies on four through six, and now I have a really nice one, but I might have to shift some points around now that I'm hitting the late 30s in levels.

I've never gone all the way through, though, to the top level. But they added an expansion after 10 years and I wanted to play through the whole game and then do the expansion!

[havocthecat]

It was written very early in the world after video games were introduced, well before MMORPGs became a huge thing, and OSC was older, so I'm not sure he was the video game sort. He tried, bless him.

Ever since I got into LARPing - and holy fuck, live action gamers are more vicious and tactical than even video gamers are - I've wondered what's the lowest people will go in order to win at the pettiest stakes and I have yet to see it.

[conuly]

Thing is, people being people, I think this was a thing even before video games. People will always try to rules lawyer and find edge cases.

[havocthecat]

Yes. That is a very good point, and an absolutely true one.

[notasupervillain]

Or the sort of people who make them.

[conuly]

Or play any sort of games, really, other than the sort with Really Strict Rules, like chess.

[notasupervillain]

Tiger Woods broke GOLF.

Humans gonna human.

[silveradept]

I suspect it was a lot harder to share your exploits widely then as it was now, so Card probably didn't have access to all the people who were already finding and exploiting games for their own purposes, even without the cheat codes. Perfect Pac-Man play certainly should have been something potentially on his mind.

(Especially after writing those scenes where Ender is a master tactician even in a situation where he's completely disadvantaged.)

[conuly]

Still. Five minutes of freeze tag with kids will show you how immediately creative they can be if it benefits themselves in a game.

[silveradept]

Sort of the point of Calvinball, isn't our? Free reign of imagination.

[jack]

He also wrote a book where the main character was an early computer game programmer, which was pretty realistic, so he learned some of this at some point.

I'm sort of torn about the fantasy game. It's made up in a way that makes no sense as a game that could ever exist, it's explicitly supposed to be AI-ish and deliberately learn to set challenges for the players that have personal meaning for them, in a way that's not really plausible for any program written as a program. But I don't know if that particular bit where he killed the giant made less sense than anything else: if you usually can't kill quest-givers, and you only have three lives, and the adults spy on your game sessions to see if you're officer material, and there's only a few dozen people allowed the play the game, it seems plausible that someone would be the first to try that thing.

It's reminding me a lot of Nethack's or Dwarf Fortress's efforts to ensure that ANY combination of things you can ever do has an appropriate response, however out there, but I didn't really have anything to say about that :)