With Finals week upon us, here is some advice from an educator to students

Come close. Closer.

You know what you don't do?

YOU DO NOT PESTER YOUR INSTRUCTOR/PROFESSOR ABOUT WHEN YOUR STUFF IS GOING TO BE GRADED.

Your educators have deadlines, and your pestering of "when's it gonna be done?" only serves as both an annoyance and as distraction, so how about you DON'T, OK?

Good.

The Dangers of Spellcheck/Grammarly/etc.

Let me preface this with this admission: I do, in fact, use Grammarly and spellchecker myself.

I am able to mostly rely on my own skills because I have the training and experience to do so.

However, there are some things that can slip past even me, so I use Grammarly to help me with those areas where I might slip up—largely to do with comma placement.

Yet, there are also times when Grammarly and the other spellcheckers are dead wrong.

Sometimes Grammarly will suggest something to me that I **know** is incorrect, and I will then disregard it because I know it is incorrect.

Therefore, I urge everyone to be cautious. Grammarly and spellcheckers are wonderful programs, but understand, at the end of the day, a program is limited compared to a human.

So, Tl: Dr—Grammarly and spellcheckers are great, but never fully rely on them.

Using too large a quote in Research Papers and other assignments

With summer rapidly coming to a close, and Fall Semesters looming, here is something of which I think college students should be aware: you can use too large a quote in a paper.

If you have a short essay—500 words/one page—you should, at best, use quotes that take up no more than two lines by themselves and not push it beyond a total of four lines being from quotes.

This is because those words aren't yours. Therefore, they don't count for word count totals in many cases (but will be considered when you're dealing with page counts).

This means you're not being cute or clever by writing an essay like this:

"I agree with Smith(20XX), "Bompbabompabomp. ramalamdingdong."(p.i) This is why you should hand jive. Like Jones (20XY) says, " Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow! Hatee-hatee-hatee-ho!"(p. v) Those are both great points."

Technically, in this example, only TWELVE of the words count. The rest, being quotes are basically blank space as far as word counts are concerned.

Academically, this is bad because I—as an educator—am getting no sense of any sort of thought beyond, "Heh. Look at me cut corners." This shows no knowledge of the subject matter, just regurgitation of quotes. They can be relevant quotes, but in the end, a paper is supposed to be where a student demonstrates their knowledge and not just vomits quotes to try to eat up word count requirements.

So, don't do this.

Thesaurus Abuse

Hello Internet,

I'm back with more wisdom earned from experience and education.

This one is: do not commit thesaurus abuse.

Thesaurus Abuse is defined as going for the most off-the-wall synonyms possible while trying to sound "smart" or "professional."

Do not do this. Unless you're trying to alleviate a repetition error, stick to common words.

Otherwise, you will come off as either pretentious or not as clever as you think you are.

I'm not saying that one shouldn't use big words— please do so—just know that unless the situation calls for it—and most do not—writing like an English Major trying to impress the Dean in an attempt to get more funding will not actually make your instructor or professor think you're intelligent.

It may just make them think you're kissing up to them or just abusing a thesaurus in an attempt to appear smarter.

So, Tl;Dr—leave the purple prose to Romance Novelists.

File Format Advice

Hello internet!

Here’s some advice that is short and to the point:unless it’s built into your school’s online file management service, DO NOT USE SHAREPOINT OR CLOUD BASED FILE SHARING SERVICES TO TURN IN YOUR ASSIGNMENTS.

It has only happened a few  times, but it’s a few too many, where a student turns in an assignment but, look at that, “You must request access to view this document.”

This is unacceptable. One cannot grade what they cannot access. Period.

So, don’t do it. Just upload a file in whatever format your instructor has asked for directly.

Ok? This has been a very short message of advice.

With Fall Term start approaching fast, here is some advice from someone who currently teaches at the college level:

Never pick an annoying font for assignments. Your instructors/professors will likely have directions on what fonts you can use. If not, stick to the normal Times/Times New Roman/Helvetica etc. You won’t win any style points for deviation into the more exotic sans serif fonts. In fact, you may just lose some.

Do not write in bold italics for more than a title or short phrases for emphasis. It is painful to look at. Trust me.

Grammarly/Word/Any other spelling and grammar checking software are not perfect. Do not wholly rely on them or you will occasionally be steered wrong.

They’re nice bits of software, but they’re limited by their programming.

Plagiarism will usually get caught. I won’t say how but know that there are tells that give things away. I added the “usually” because instructors/professors are not perfect and people can get past them.

This next one I cannot emphasize enough: Ask for help if you need it.

Instructors/Professors will do their best to help you. They might just direct you to the tutoring services your college/university has (and all of them have those if they’re not a third-rate toilet). They might offer direct feedback, if they don’t already.

If something is confusing, ask them to clarify it.

If they can’t, then they’re a bad instructor/professor.

Just don’t suffer in silence. Instructors/Professors should be there to help (otherwise they’re bad at their jobs).

I’m making videoes because I am trying to get over my fear of public speaking.

Today I ramble on about Public Education’s failure to actually impart lessons about Curtains being blue and I also ramble about why this is more than just a color choice.

Also, special guest pest star Bae.

Why applying modern morals to certain fairy tales ends up with unsatisfactory results. I'm doing videos like this as a way of trying to overcome my fear of public speaking and to slow down my nervous hyper-speed speech.SHOW LESS

Review- Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

I’ll admit this here: I’ve never played a regular warriors game. 

I played the previous Hyrule Warriors, but I’ve yet to beat it. I’ll get around to it…eventually.

I also played the CRAP out of Breath of the Wild. It’s now my favorite Zelda game, knocking poor Ocarina of Time of its pedestal.

Ok, they share it, to be perfectly honest. 

Twilight Princess  has sentimental position up with the others because it was the first Zelda game I ever beat. 

The first one I played was A Link to the Past and I was far too little to understand it at the time. 

I digress, I’m here to talk about Age of Calamity. 

I’ll go through a non-spoilery section and then move on to the spoilers in the next bit.

The gameplay was actually pretty fun. Hyrule Warriors could get repetitive, something I’m given to understand is an issue of the main Warriors series. 

Age of Calamity is actually more fun. Yeah, it’s still a similar game style but they implemented enough of Breath of the Wild and Zelda into it that it doesn’t feel anywhere near as same-y to play as Hyrule Warriors could be. 

I’m not saying that Hyrule Warriors had too much in the way of same-y game play but it definitely felt way more repetitive to me. 

Each character has their own way they play and if you don’t click with them, you’re not going to enjoy playing them but those you do click with can then be a lot of fun in Age of Calamity.

The Divine Beast sections were not a highlight for me. I just am not a fan of them. Three out of four felt epic. The fourth was not.

Yeah, I’m talking trash about Vah Rudania. Would not recommend that Divine Beast. Which is a shame because of the Champions, he is easily the one I handle the best in combat. Or he was untilI figured out how to play Mipha. 

The story is much more a Zelda story this time. The other story just kinda felt….not. 

Hyrule Warriors’s story just sort felt like a massive crossover fanfiction. 

And, this won’t be the last time I reference fanfiction either but that’s for the spoiler section.

The game was pretty cohesive and the incentives for 100% the side quests (aside from leveling) are nice enough and easy enough to obtain that it’s not a total grind to do it.

Speaking of leveling, I did have a bit of an edge for that. You see, I got the demo and it transfers save data and I’d max-leveled Link for that demo (level 20 in case you were wondering) which meant if I found enough rupees, I could instantly get most of my crew up to that level. Zelda and Impa were mid to high teens whenever I was done with the demo btw. 

In Hyrule Warriors, it did feel a bit grindy at times but I didn’t have that nice 20 levels from my demo advantage. 

There are relatively few buggy moments in this game but once when I was playing as a character I can’t mention without spoilers, they got caught in a sort of loop where they’d do a move and I couldn’t get them to stop.

Sometimes the camera angles would fight me when I was up against bigger foes like the final boss or Hinoxes. 

Beyond that, the game runs fine. 

I enjoyed it but for those looking for a straight up prequel to Breath of the Wild, the only non-spoilery thing I can say is-it’s not this. It does touch on a few things and we do get to play the Champions but it’s not the game you think it is if you want to see what happened before Link ended up in the Shrine of Resurrection in the game this spun-off of.

Tl;Dr-I do recommend this game if you like Zelda and want a game where your weapons don’t break every five minutes and you like feeling like a BAMF as you mow down enemy after enemy. 

If you don’t like Warriors games or wanted that dark prequel-you might want to pass on this.

Now leave if you want to avoid spoilers.

Keep reading

Mini-Game Review: Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom was an impulse buy. I bought it, Unruly Heroes, and Windbound at around the same time. Though, Windbound was a game I’d been looking forward to playing after I saw a trailer for it. I haven’t played much of it yet to say too much more and this post is about Monster Boy.

It plays like a standard platformer at times. It does side-scroll but you can backtrack. It’s mostly on a 2D plane with up down and left right movement.

I have terrible platforming skills. I always have. I prefer RPGs almost out of self-defense to platforming. Just kidding, but the fact a platformer needs a lot more precision than I can usually muster is why I, usually, prefer RPGs. 

Now while I call it a platformer, it has a bit of everything in it. There are Adventure RPG style elements, combat, puzzles, and even a few times where it becomes a side-scrolling shoot ‘em up a la Gradius (a game whose name I just had to google because I’ve seen it played but never knew its name). 

This variation in playing styles mostly comes from the forms Monster Boy-whose name is Jin- can take: Pig, Snake, Lion, Dragon, and Human. 

With each new form unlocked, you can then back-track across the game to find things you might have missed before or areas you were previously unable to access.

For instance, there was a chest in a water section that you needed the Snake to access as well as the Pig to shoot a fireball as part of the puzzle solution. 

Each form has its own drawbacks and strengths.

As far as pure platforming the Frog, Human, or Lion are best at that. The Pig and Snake’s jumps leave a lot to be desired and the Dragon can fly making platforming a non-issue. 

Puzzles force you to use both your brain and your timing, which I personally struggled with. 

The controls were frustrating to me-at times-and a few configurations didn’t make much sense to me but I got used to it. There were very few times it felt like the character’s jumps and landing were too slippery and those often involved ice platforms to begin with. 

The Story, as minimal as it was, I found compelling enough that I wanted to know why everyone had gotten cursed and see Jin and his family and friends be free of the spell. 

This game also payed homage to the previous games in the series as this is actually part of the Wonder Boy series. Both with a few 8-bit sections here and there and direct references to some of the previous protagonists. I felt it was a nice touch to honor the past while maintaining its own identity. 

Now on to the aesthetics. I impulse bought this game because I saw footage of it in action and I thought it looked gorgeous. I love games that look like this. It’s not just a nostalgia thing, I just think these games are beautiful. Also, who doesn’t want to play what looks like a cartoon/anime? 

Having beaten the game, I would recommend it, despite how frustrating I found it at times due to my own lack of platforming skills.

It’s wonderful to look at and overall it’s just a good time. 

Why Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu worked and why Warcraft didn’t

I bought Sonic on digital because I did actually enjoy the film. It was the second to last film I saw in theaters. The last being the well meaning but clumsily executed Onward. It got me to thinking as to why this film based on a game series worked and why others didn’t. Video game adaptations have a reputation for being terrible or just plain cheesy at best. See the infamous 90′s Super Mario Brothers film for the really bad end of things versus the 1997 Mortal Kombat. For the most part they deserve their reputation as other films based on games tended to fall on the cheesy but fun end of things, where the Mortal Kombat films ended up, and the really bad end where that abomination of Satan Mario film ended up. 

With the last two years of movies we’ve gotten two live action/digital hybrid video game based films that were actually considered good all across the board. Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog. We already know about the near miss Sonic had but I have to admit even with nightmare fuel design, the characters were enjoyable even if the plot was basic due to the target demographic being kids. We nostalgic adults were a secondary aspect. So why did these two films aimed at children work but the more “serious” fantasy style film for Warcraft fall flat on its face is what I want to get at with this post. 

It’s not a lack of human characters on screen as Warcraft did have those (and I even grew attached to the mage apprentice guy since I play mages in WoW when I play WoW). Nor was it a lack of familiarity with their world. Sonic the Hedgehog might have had that going for it but Detective Pikachu didn’t and it still worked. It’s not even having less to world build with as, once again, Detective Pikachu takes place in the Pokemon world which has (over the years) built up its own lore and legends with each new region. I believe it comes down to the execution, characterizations, and choices in what story to tell.

Keep reading

Lost in Adaptation

Though there have been successful game based movies before, like Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, that was about a fictional game coming to life. It worked for a different set of reasons and they all had to do with the concept of half-real Juul talks about in the book of the same name(Juul 121-162). That begs the question, can real games get proper adaptations into film without having their attempts fall flat. The short history of video game movies does not really suggest that this is usually possible. Yet even then exceptions can exist. For the sake of simplicity I will be sticking to movies produced by the West AKA Hollywood that are not animated that feature real game properties being adapted into films. To get the greatest breadth of the attempts to adapt games into movies I’ll pick one per decade since the very first live action adaptation of a video game came out in 1993. That movie is one that I’ve often chosen to pretend doesn’t exist as it was a very disappointing childhood memory: Super Mario Bros. Next I’l jump ahead to the 00’s with 2008’s Doom. Finally, I’ll look at the recent game based movie Pokémon: Detective Pikachu. Where did the previous two movies from prior two decades go wrong where Pokémon: Detective Pikachu got things right is the question I seek to answer by analyzing these games based films from those decades. Please note, I will not be counting any movies made by Uwe Boll amongst adaptations that got things wrong as I am lead to believe he does not care about how far off track he takes his films and it would appear as if he does it on purpose. Therefore, all films he makes are anomalies and should not be counted.

First, the movie that started it all. Super Mario Brothers was a very big deal in the early ’90’s. As a child of that decade, I know first hand how ascendant Mario and Luigi were. My older siblings and cousins all clamored to play as much Super Mario Brothers games on their NESes as they could. Naturally, a movie based on their beloved game was going to be awe inspiring.Oh, it was but for all the wrong reasons. To be fair to Hollywood, games are hard to adapt into a movie because of that half-real element many games have to them, especially story light platforming games of the NES era. However, that still doesn’t fully explain how they went from a fantasy romp where the hero—an everyman Italian plumber— rescuing the princess from a monster into gritty sci-fi dystopia, extra emphasis on the gritty. The set design, cinematography, plot choices, and direction are all bizarre when one takes a step back to just look at it. For instance, their redesign of the iconic Bowser into a man with weird hair. Because of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film coming out three years prior, the ability to have made a puppet suit for someone to wear to bring Bowser to life in all his dragon-turtle glory existed. Yet, for some reason, instead of respecting the intellectual property, whomever had purchased the rights handed the project off to writers who clearly were so embarrassed to be adapting a video game that they didn’t bother actually adapting it. As a small child, all I’d cared about was that they’d made Yoshi look weird and the goomba’s looked wrong. Now that I’m older, I’m more perplexed by why they’d choose to go so far a field. Their idea had no business being grafted into the Super Mario Brothers’ universe. In fact, had they not been supposed to be adapting Super Mario Brothers, their idea would have been fun for a Sci-fi B-Movie. Instead they just went so far off to the side that it left a shadow that kept Nintendo from allowing anyone to make movies from their IPs. The actors did what they could but a bad script and bad direction cannot be overcome by anyone. (Super Mario Bros)

The shadow wasn’t just cast by Super Mario Bros but other movies kept the belief that video game movies just would not work alive. Thus we get to Doom. I was far too young to play Doom at its initial height of popularity but I knew what it was. So by 2005, after strings of other not-so-good-to-so-campy-its-fun video game adaptations, it was Doom’s turn. The trailers looks promising. Then what happened was a clumsily cobbled together film that used elements of Doom’s barely there plot, as well as plot threads from Alien and other space horror flicks to produce a B-movie that bears next-to-no resemblance to Doomat all. There’s an instance where the movie switches to first person POV like the game, and the human antagonist has become and alien creature called a “pinky” which is a demon from Doom, but ultimately being PG-13 could not deliver on the gore factor needed to fully capture what it was that Doom was: a bloody maze of gore and violence. In this case, it was likely based on the fact it was Doom that they thought adapting it was a good idea, but in their fumbled and neutered execution they made a so-so space horror that almost utterly fails as an adequate adaptation of the game of the same name’s fame it had tried to cash in on. Again, the set design is questionable as it is set largely on a space ship instead of in a maze of tunnels through Hell, and the tame levels of violence are not reflective of the core part of Doom’s appeal at all. The acting was decent enough, but otherwise the story direction and direction in general are suspect. 2005’s Doom failed because it did not try to be the by proxy gore fest that its source material was and without that gore, the classic Doom doesn’t have enough of an identity to fall back upon (Doom).

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu: A film I’d initially thought would also fail. One reason was because I thought the game it was based on was a silly idea when it came out, but also because it had become an almost accepted maxim that all video game based movies would continue to be awful because when it comes to gaming that Half-real effect I mentioned that Juul wrote about makes it hard to fully adapt a game because we, the players are not just passive watchers but active participants with game play, meaning what we do is projected into what happens so even with highly story based games, like a Final Fantasy title, no two people are going to have the exact same gameplay experience (Juul 121-62). Yet, those games have a higher chance of being adaptable.  Those games prior to Pokémon: Detective Pikachu that most consider to be meh-to-passable all tended to be those based on games that tended to have far more of a narrative world to them than something like Doom or Super Mario Bros which were adapted from a story light FPS and story extra-light platformer. In the case of Pokémon: Detective Pikachu versus the series it spun-off from, until Generation V, there really wasn’t much to the story to speak of, and though it’s still not central to the main games, it’s stepped up to keep with what Generation V did. Pokémon: Detective Pikachu is a point and click adventure the is full of story and characterization that is not dependent wholly on the player, making its world and story far more adaptable into film format. A second thing the makers of Pokémon Detective Pikachu got right was they kept the aesthetics of the Pokémon world whenever they were designing the set design. They only deviated as such to make sure that these things looked coherent and real in that sense but it still reflected the worlds the games had presented. The pokémon were also a huge factor. They had to be redesigned to fit with the humans in the movie, but those redesigns were made with respect to how these creatures would look were they actually real creatures, keeping the uncanny valley at bay. Also, in a start contrast to the Super Mario Bros movie, this world was not only vibrant but it was a live and full the the fantastical creatures people expect to see in a world full of pokémon. Which is to say, we expect to see pokémon and they fulfilled that and then some. The plot is nothing extravagant or especially complex, but it was fun, it had genuine moments of heart and it fit in perfectly with the insanity that can happen within the pokémon universe. It felt like it and the games took place in the same world (Pokémon: Detective Pikachu).

Doom and Super Mario Bros on their own are not actually purely awful films. Doom fits right in with a lot of passable sci-fi horror trying to be Alien—and failing— whereas Super Mario Bros is more like an 80’s sci-fi B-flick that is trying to be cool—and also failing. However, the problem is these movies do not exist on their own, they were in fact adaptations of other intellectual properties that their makers did not respect enough to properly adapt to the silver screen. Whereas the Pokémon: Detective Pikachu film had nothing but respect for the game franchise it was representing into a live-action/CGI hybrid. Pokémon Detective Pikachu fits into the Pokémon World. It feels like it belongs there, and these events could be in that same universe. That, ultimately, is where the other two films failed horribly. Both films, so caught up in trying to be appealing to everyone, lost their identities to the point that they no longer fit in the worlds they were supposed to be adapting.

Works Cited

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu. Directed by Rob Letterman. Performances by Ryan Reynolds, Justice Smith, and Kathryn Newton. Legendary Entertainment, 2019.

Doom. Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak. Performances by Karl Urban,Dwayne Johnson, Rosamund Pike. Universal Pictures, 2005.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. Directed by Jake Kasdan, performances by  Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Kevin Hart , and Jack Black, Sony Pictures, 2017.

Juul, Jesper. Half-Real. MIT Press, 2005. pg 121-162.

Super Mario Bros. Directed by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton. Performances by  Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper. Allied Filmmakers, 1993.

Game Movies Blog 2

Aesthetics Battle: Sonic the Hedgehog vs Detective Pikachu

With the Sonic the Hedgehod movie trailer dropping, reactions from how Sonic has been rendered in this live-action/CGI blend world of his movie are mixed to “burn it with fire.” Many people had also reacted with similar variations to the unveiling of Pikachu’s more fluffy form, but as time went on and the rest of the Pokemon of that world were unveiled, Pikachu’s design seemed less uncanny: The prize for most uncanny Pokemon rendered in realistic CGI goes to their version of Mr. Mime. I digress, so what happened here, one might ask. Why is Pikachu’s 3D design more acceptable than Sonic’s design. It all lies with where each falls within the uncanny valley. For those who don’t know or have always seen this term thrown around I’ll briefly define “the uncanny valley.” It originally had to do with how humanoid androids were becoming and that there were two peaks of recognition: Not Human and Very Human/Human. When an object falls between this in looks, it’s in the Uncanny Valley where our brains just react with rejection to how things look (MacDorman, K. F.; Ishiguro, H. 297–337).

Detective Pikachu’s lead Pikachu both does and doesn’t fall into this. The reason some had a reaction to his design at first appeared to be because they’d added some very realistic animal textures and features to to mascot of the Pokemon franchise in ways one didn’t expect from its cartoon design. Personally, I thought he was cute the whole time. However, since Pikachu is not humanoid at all and is kept very animal-like-to the point where they make his paws actually seem more like paws—the uncanny valley is avoided, especially once other Pokemon in these “realistic” renderings show up and start to share the screen with him as each preview goes along helping to mitigate how different he looks. Thus, the cute mascot has made a successful transition from stylized 2-D to a somewhat reasonably plausible looking 3d CGI form because he stayed out of the Uncanny Valley very firmly on the side of “does not look like a human.” (Warner Pictures).

Unfortunately, none of this was kept in mind whenever the studio behind Sonic the Hedgehog’s movie treatment went forwards. Like many others, the first question I have is why they even bothered with a live action CGI hybrid for this movie in the first place as it’s been proven by past Sonic the Hedgehog games that Sonic and co do not look good next to humans that are not cartoons or rendered in a more cartoon style (Sonic the Hedgehog 2006). Secondly the design is a huge problem for many because it really went full blown uncanny valley. The took the non-human cartoon and added far too many human-like elements to the CGI render and this landed this design of Sonic squarely in the uncanny valley(Movieclip Trailers). To paraphrase a youtuber, Yong Yea: this sonic needs Jesus (YongYea). The teeth and proportions are what really unnerve many, myself included. Instead of Sonic the Hedgehog, it reminds me far too much of a deformed toddler because he’s about the size and shape of a small human child but he’s not a child and it causes a feedback loop of Unncanniness that cannot be broken. He is too human to comfortably look at (Movieclip Trailers).

Can whomever is making this movie fix Sonic the Hedgehog’s design in time for the movie’s release?  I’m going to go with probably not. It’s not that I wouldn’t love to see them do something to drag this Sonic out of the Uncanny Valley but even if they did put a bunch of animators on the job of fixing this uncanny monstrosity right this instant there’s also still the problem of the fact that no matter how much like Sonic they can salvage this design to look like, the rest of the movie also (to me) just doesn’t work at all. True, they did this with a cartoon once, I think, where he’s in our world but part of the appeal of Sonic was his own world and a throw away reference to the opening stage is not going to cut it.

Works Cited

MacDorman, K. F.; Chattopadhyay, D. “Reducing consistency in human realism increases the uncanny valley effect; increasing category uncertainty does not”. Cognition. 146: 190–205. <doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2015.09.019. PMID 26435049.>

MacDorman, K. F.; Ishiguro, H. “The uncanny advantage of using androids in social and cognitive science research”. Interaction Studies. 7 (3): 297–337.< doi:10.1075/is.7.3.03mac.>

“Pokémon Detective Pikachu - Official Trailer #1.” Warner Pictures <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1roy4o4tqQM>

“Pokémon Detective Pikachu - Official Trailer 2.”Warner Pictures. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bILE5BEyhdo>

Sonic the Hedgehog Trailer #1 (2019) | Movieclips Trailers

Movieclips Trailers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfEpqmdXhiU

Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega, Xbox 360, 2006.

“Sonic Movie Needs Jesus.” YongYea, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAK1GARcE9g>

Companions in Video Games

Within games, especially RPGs, you will inevitably come across companion characters for your protagonist to interact with or have a starting party that you are with or will gather. These side characters all have different aspects to them and add stuff to the gameplay experience over all. How this has changed over time is interesting. Going back as far as the fourth generation of games on the SNES there is Secret of Mana that comes to mind. Next I’ll just jump ahead and across platforms to Kingdom Hearts for the PS2, and finally we round this out with two more modern titles: Diablo 3 and Persona 5. There are countless games I could have chosen, but for this these are the ones I’ll use.

With Secret of Mana the player character—Randy— starts off alone after getting kicked out of his village. Then after the first few quests he gains Primm—the female warrior— and Popoi—the sprite child— as companions. Along the way the party characters do have some plot relevance here and there but from then on, that’s who are in Randy’s party through the conclusion of the game (Secret of Mana). The companions are given their own motivations as they adventure with Randy helping him on his quest, and they tie in, but much of what is done is story mandated and the companions are there.

This is similar to how companions are handled with Kingdom Hearts. This time player character—Sora—not only starts off alone but ends up having to fight a major boss alone and then ends up on a new world before he is paired up with Mickey Mouses’s sidekicks: Donald Duck and Goofy. They do have interactions throughout the game, and there are guest party members that can be swapped out for one of the pair since the party is limited to three characters. However, a lot like Secret of Mana the interactions between Sora, Donald, and Goofy doesn’t have much impact on the game that the characters can really affect. They’re just there, as friends because the game says so (Kingdom Hearts).

Whenever we jump ahead to the modern games I’ve selected —one a Western RPG and one a JRPG—things are a little different with the JRPG than the Western One but not by too much. With Diablo 3 you still gain companions when the game dictates that you will, especially those that will accompany you into battle. Another departure between Diablo 3 and the prior games is (unless you’re playing online in a multiplayer mode) you are limited to only one companion character. Each of these characters have an initial quest that is played with them and afterwards they are free to be chosen. They even have other specific side quests related to them depending on what part of the game the player is in. Also given time are the three artisans that can be recruited to the hero’s cause. Covetous Shen, Miriam the Vechin, and Haedrig the Blacksmith. Not only are these three also quest activated (through the first play-through that is) but as artisans they can be leveled up and occasionally there will be side quests that can be undertaken to expand more about them. e.g. Haedrig’s apprentice disappeared with his hammer, if one explores one of the first maps enough, they’ll find his apprentice met a sticky end. Speaking with the companions can also reveal more about them and unlock new bits of dialogue if one had been a bit lax in doing so prior (Diablo 3). However, as interesting as all of this is, beyond the initial things, none of these are mandatory. The player is given a choice on whether or not they want to continue grinding through the side character dialogue that isn’t banter whenever they’re with whatever hero the player’s chosen to play (in my case, I’m always a female wizard). You can unlock an achievement for taking the time to talk to them, but beyond completionists seeking achievements, the game leaves it up to your choice. Whereas with the prior games mentioned the companions’ stories really don’t go beyond whatever the main plot demands but you also were sort of given an easy way to resolve most of the pertinent threads to these characters. Which leads to the most recent game Persona 5. Like Diablo 3, the party member companions are unlock able through story based missions from which they’re permanent members of the party afterwards. Certain other companions (or confidants as they are in Persona 5) are also unlocked by story events—e.g. Sae Nijima. However, beyond that, the player has to go out and make the choice to find all the other confidantes that they can unlock and level up certain abilities to even start on that confidant bond. For instance, the character of Haru Okumura is one of the last party members to join the party in the main story of the game. Yet, in order to even start her confidant bond the player character needs to have specific levels of Charm and Knowledge to even start with her. Now, the player doesn’t have bother with these but it will severely hamper their game later on as the stronger the bonds between the protagonist and the other characters he can have relationships is, the more abilities cheaters can unlock—especially those in the main party (Persona 5).

Persona 5 is not the first game to have this be an option by a long shot, but it’s become more common as of Persona 5’s release to have a system where the player has to recruit characters to be friends or even recruit party members in some cases of games within the prior generations, e.g. Star Ocean. However it has become more common and understandably more complex in how you go about interacting with companions and/or recruiting them. See BioWare’s two most popular RPG franchises for instance: Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I think this evolution in party member recruitment is partly due to technology growing to allow this and a way to make games more immersive as well as add some variability to game play. e.g. In Persona 5 my first play through I had the protagonist romance Ann but in my second play through I had him romance Haru. I also, in my first play through, missed out on a lot of the companions because I didn’t know to look for them and the five social stats—knowledge, charm, guts, proficiency, kindness— had areas that were lacking for those relationships. It gave me something to work on to open up new options for companions and later new side quests. Same could be said for Diablo 3’s companions. The difference between them is in Diablo 3, the companion quests were added by Blizzard to occur after merely talking to the companions as opposed to grinding out the relationship in different outings like in Persona 5. When looking back to the past and to the present, companion relationships are getting more sophisticated in RPG games because it is both a trend that players seem to like this, and it adds more depth to the games. “Do you think an RPG do without these relationship aspects and still be fun” one might ask me and the answer is: yes. Not all games have to do this, take the most recent Kingdom Hearts title for instance. It’s certainly an RPG but it does not do any of that and is still a very well received game (Persona 5, Diablo III, Kingdom Hearts III) . In short, as games change and evolve, so do many aspects of game play. The companion systems are just one of those.

Works Cited

Diablo III. Blizzard, Windows, 2012.

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 Collection. Square Enix, PS4, 2017.

Kingdom Hearts III. Square Enix, PS4, 2019.

Persona 5. Atlus, PS4, 2016.

Secret of Mana. Square Enix, SNES Classic, 2017.

Works referenced

Dragon Age: Origins. BioWare, Windows, 2009.

Dragon Age II. BioWare, Windows, 2011.

Dragon Age: Inquisition. BioWare, Windows, 2014

Mass Effect. BioWare, Windows, 2007

Mass Effect 2. BioWare, Windows, 2010.

Mass Effect 3. BioWare, Windows, 2012.

Star Ocean: The Second Story. Square Enix, 2009.

History Repeats itself again and again and again…..

Before I begin, the reason I’m posting this outright on my main account and not first posting this to @professorprophetess and then reblogging it stems from this being an opinion-based academic piece. Technically, most academic works have an opinion but this is a very blatant opinion piece (with sources) and cited academically. Also, I am focusing on one particular aspect to controversies with video games. I am not addressing video game addiction.

Without further ado:

It seems to me that every five-ten years or so we hear this phrase in the news:

“Are video games bad for children?”

I phrase it this way because we had the very first instances of people fearing “for the children” against the “corrupting” influence of video games dating all the way back to 1985. Of course, this was likely more from the fact Arcades didn’t used to be family safe fun fairs, but instead were much seedier establishments (Donovan 225,  June). Those who brought this to the nation’s attention at this time made no headway and this idea of “games are bad” was shelved until it was again brought forth in the early 1990’s by Senator Joe Leiberman who wasted taxpayer dollars over his staffer’s outrage concerning the Sega game Nighttrap and Midways infamous Mortal Kombat (Donovan224-236). What resulted from this was the creation of the ESRB. Before games were not given their ratings so kids could end up playing something ill-suited to smaller children just as movies prior to 1968’s were not given ratings either (filmsite.org). Then again it was brought up in the 2000’s thanks to Grand Theft Auto (Jenkins 198-207). It was the 2000’s controversies that I am most familiar with being a teenager at the time and my response then is the same as it was now: resounding scorn and annoyance. Now, with Fortnite taking center stage along with other modern games, we are (once again) rehashing this idea that violent video games make violent people (Colzato, Lorenza et al, Hill and Simon).

Sorry to disappoint those who continually drag this up but scientific studies have actually been done in the intervening years between 1982 until present there has not been found to be any direct correlation between someone playing a violent video game and someone going out and committing an act of violence. Anecdotally I can put forth myself as a bit of evidence as I’ve played violet video games like Mortal Kombat, God of War, and Diablo and yet I’m not a violet sociopath who can’t tell fact from fiction. Studies like the one I’m citing have often come to the same conclusions that video games do not cause violence in people. It’s just something people with an agenda and an axe to grind or a desire to gain notoriety tend to “champion” whenever it suits them. It’s time to say “enough already.” I do not want to see this rehashed next decade. Let’s end this now. All of you would be “anti-video game crusaders” listen to this:

Video games do not cause people to be violent. End of story. Stop this inanity, and find some other crusade to champion and leave this skeleton of a horse alone. You beat away all its flesh, after all.

Works Cited

Colzato, Lorenza S, et al. “Action Video Gaming and Cognitive Control: Playing First Person Shooter Games Is Associated

with Improvement in Working Memory but Not Action Inhibition.” Psychological Research, vol. 77, no. 2, 2013, pp.

234–9.

Donovan, Tristan. Replay. Yellow Ant, 2010. Pg 224-236

Hill, Erin and Simon Perry. “Prince Harry is sharing his concerns about the popular online video game, Fortnite, which has come under fire for being dangerously addictive”People, 3 Oct 2018. Accessed 23 Apr 2019. <https://people.com/royals/prince-harry-fortnite-controversy/>

Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York University Press, 2006.

June, Lara. “For Amusement Only: The life and death of the American Arcade.” The Verge, 16 Jan 2013. Accessed 23 Apr 2019 <https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3740422/the-life-and-death-of-the-american-arcade-for-amusement-only>

“The Year 1968.” AMC film site. NA Accessed 23 Apr 2019. <https://www.filmsite.org/1968-filmhistory.html>

Sitting observing a class and a student is drawing furry art the whole time.

Isekai and Video Games

With how video games are an inherently multi-medial entity, it’s no wonder that a common trope of story telling is being transported into a game or having a character sent to another world. In Eastern animation and fiction this is called an “isekai” style of story.  “Isekai” means, literally, “different World” in Japanese and in urban slang is the name of that entire genre for anime, manga, movies, and lite novels. In Western Fiction, the term “portal fiction” is used instead but both describe very much the same phenomena. Within video games, there are many examples of portal fictions and isekai since games are from all over, though with my own personal library a lot are from Japan. There aren’t all that many differences between the Eastern and Western versions of these stories, therefore, by my definition portal fiction and isekai are very much interchangeable. However, in the interest of simplicity, I will hence forth just use “isekai” as it is one word. 

There are so many examples of this sort of story within the Eastern and Western traditions of stories, that I will mostly only be taking about how it is handled in regards to gaming. One of the more recent examples of an Isekai game that I’ve played is “Ni no Kuni 2.” Another that I’ve played is “Exist Archive,” and a third is “Brave Story.” Despite being from disparate companies and having different approaches to the genres and even having differing sources, they share a central thing in common: the one transported from the real world is a male from a world very much like ours through a sudden event either it being a directly harmful event or something that could have been harmful. 

The fact all three of these share a male protagonist, I suppose, shouldn’t be too much of a shock. With just a brief mental search of the Isekai anime and manga that I know of (and am fond of) almost all of them have males in the lead. Sword Art Online, The Boy and the Beast, That Time I got Reincarnated as a Slime, and Konosuba. One of the only ones I can think of that is a quasi-Isekai that doesn’t have a male lead only doesn’t have one on a technicality and that was .hack//SIGN where (spoiler) Tsukasa was a girl offline the whole time. I’m not saying there aren’t any female led isekai adventures, as I count Spirited Away as an isekai and Chihiro is definitely a girl. Same could be said for The Cat Returns. My Neighbor Totoro is one that is kinda Isekai too. However, I will plead ignorance on other female isekai fictions in Eastern fiction, but I’d love to know more.

Something else the shared male protagonists have is they are from a modern setting. This is not mandatory but is very common as it is a grounding element. In this we have a deviation between the exact origins of the three transported characters. The protagonist of Exist Archive Kanta Kujo is a teenage boy. The player character (whose stand in name is Traveller) of Brave Story is an elementary student a lot like the character of Wataru from the book of the same name from which it was adapted. Roland from Ni no Kuni 2 is by far the most above average person to be in an isekai scenario as he was president of a whole country. Those other anime and fictions I mentioned before, the people from the world like ours is ordinarily an average person. 

Roland stands out a bit more than the others once it’s seen that while he is a major character, Ni no Kuni 2 is more about Evan and his kingdom than it is Roland’s adventures in that new world. Whereas with the other two games, the characters that are played as are the ones whom the story revolves around. Traveller differs from the other two in that he didn’t die to get to the other world called Vision whereas the other two died outright. Kanata in a sort of accident/domestic terrorist incident and Roland during an assassination attempt. 

Yet, despite those minor differences, the stories start in sort of the same way. The transported characters through a strange event end up headfirst in a new world and end up encountering some sort of guide—be it a person or mystical—that guides them as to what they need to do. This is usually immediately followed by battle, since that is the best way to fit the combat tutorial into a game. Beyond that the three stories go different ways, for the most part. Brave Story is a standard hero’s journey. Exist Archive is a hero’s journey mixed with a mystery of the world that Kanata and the others find themselves in after their deaths as well as the mystery behind the identity of Mayura Tsukishiro, the white haired girl with pigtails and no memories. Ni no Kuni 2 is more about Evan’s coming of age than anything else. 

In my experience playing these three games, these central conceits did help with introducing the worlds to me, and helped suspend my disbelief while playing and helped me get into the worlds and stories. The reason this works so well is most video games are designed to pull players into their worlds to begin with. To reference Jesper Juul’s Half-Real, it’s because the player is a piece to completing the puzzle. By making the story one that transports characters from a familiar setting to another is an easy way of getting players deeper into the game. This even works with games that are more in line with western portal fantasies, like Kingdom Hearts. The tutorial area might be a tropical island but its a lot like something we’ve seen before and the players are there long enough to get a feel for the Destiny Islands before the main story begins. Of course, what Kingdom Hearts has as an advantage over other isekai games I’ve mentioned is that the other worlds were mostly the worlds of well known films. Still, thanks to the half-real state of play, games are already sort of an isekai like experience in and of themselves to begin with.Therefore it’s a logical conclusion a lot of modern isekai style stories exist in games, and why a fair few iseakai fictions outside the realm of games tend to use video game logic. It’s already an adventure you go on, just taken a step further.

Works Cited

Brave Story. PSP. Xseed Games, 2007.

Exist Archive. Playstation 4. Spike Chunsoft, 2016.

.hack//SIGN. directed by Koichi Mashimo. Beetrain, Funimation, 2002.

“Isekai.” Urban Dictionary. N/A. 18 Apr 2019. <https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=isekai>

Juul, Jesper. Half-Real. MIT Press, 2005. pg 121-162.

Ni no Kuni 2. Playstation 4. Bandai Namco Entertainment, 2018.

“Portal Fiction.” Good Reads. N/A. 18 April 2019. <https://www.goodreads.com/genres/portal-fiction>

Works Referenced

Miyuki, Miyabe. Brave Story. Viz Media, 2003.

My Neighbor Totoro.directed by Hayao Miyzaki.. Studio Ghibli, 1993.

Konosuba. directed by Takaomi Kanasaki . Studio Deen, Crunchyroll, 2016.

Kingdom Hearts. Playstation 2. Square Enix. 2002.

Spirited Away. directed by Hayao Miyzaki.. Studio Ghibli, 2003.

Sword Art Online. directed by Tomohiko Ito. A-1 Pictures, Aniplex, 2012.

The Boy and the Beast. directed by Mamoru Hasoda, Studio Chizu, 2015.

The Cat Returns. directed by Hayao Miyzaki. Studio Ghibli, 2002.

That Time I got Reincarnated as a Slime. directed by Yasuhito Kikuchi, 8-Bit, Funimation, 2018.