Today’s game is the first brought to you by Steam-Powered Hope! Plenty of thanks to Charles, who decided he wanted to see an episode about Kerbal Space Program (previously scheduled for game #101) right now, and made a donation to the Calgary Distress Centre. If you want to see a specific game on Full Steam Ahead, ask me for details!
Time logged before Full Steam Ahead: 3 Hours
One of the appealing things about many games is the way they can show me different experiences. For a little while, being a greengrocer with a penchant for games slides on to the backburner, and I can experience something very different. We’ve already seen, in earlier posts, games that put me in the shoes of an undercover policeman, and kung fu practitioner, a contract mercenary, and many others.
In most games, the designers are interested in making these experiences easier than they would be in real life. By improving controls, or providing easy to read visual cues, or perhaps including a comprehensive, easy to understand tutorial, game designers put a lot of work into making these experiences easier to jump into, our more fun to play.
Kerbal Space Program is a little different. It’s not that the designers didn’t care, it’s just that they cared more about providing an accurate rocket science simulator. The good news is that they succeeded. The bad news is that rocket science is very, very hard.
Damn, kind of regretting using Fly Me To The Moon lyrics last episode.
Two years ago I picked up a novel that I got for free in a Loot Crate as a way to pass the time in airports and on planes while going on vacation. That book was Ready Player One. I wrote one of my first blog posts about it, since I had enjoyed the experience and it had presented some ideas that I thought were kind of neat. I figured that Ready Player One was going to remain fairly obscure; a love letter to geek culture that only people who like to analyze geek culture will pick up. We can see now that I was wrong. Insignificant novels rarely get remade as movies by Steven Spielberg.
I have noticed that there is an undercurrent of hate for RPO and I don’t think it’s entirely justified. It’s not very loud at all on the mainstream media hype machine. If everything you know about RPO is what you learned when you saw the trailer at the theatre when you were there to see Black Panther then it might even surprise you that there are people who aren’t stoked to go see this film. But a quick search of Twitter will show you that in between the fanboys, some people see it as a mirror of the rebirth of mainstream fascism. From what I can gather, the sharpest criticism for RPO falls into one or more of these categories:
The pop culture references are empty and the prose is indulgent, therefore the novel is trash.
The book doesn’t address the dysfunctional relationships that white guys have with their fandoms.
It elevates the “nerd” stereotype into places that it shouldn’t be.
Not having read the book, just complaining about something like the fact that there is imagery of an Iron Giant fighting others and that’s totally wrong.
My intention is to respond to these in a way that doesn’t flinch at the bad parts, but does explain why my experience as the reader was a good one that will drive me to go see the film.
At one time I was an anti-Steam Luddite. I was used to an old model of game distribution whereby a person would go to a store, pick up a disc, bring it home, and the household would be able to play the game. I resented the very notion that my dad, my brother, and myself would EACH have to pay ~$70 for the game we wanted to play. But, as the platform grew, their extreme discounts made things more affordable, and when I was no longer living in the same house as family members with whom I might want to share I was primed for my eventual turn: there was no other way to play Civilization V. It was a choice between Steam and no Civ. We know how that turned out.
So, now the majority of the video games I play are on Steam. Ever since the Full Steam Ahead series started on this blog, at least half of the content here has been related to games that were purchased and played through the increasingly ubiquitous platform. As far as gaming and content goes, I have come to put a lot of trust in Valve’s Steam. Unfortunately, they have chosen to punch a hole in that trust. As of this morning, Super Seducer was still available on the Steam Store. In case you haven’t heard, it’s supposedly a dating sim. I didn’t think I would be writing about this genre again so soon. It’s not normally my thing. But this goes beyond things I personally don’t like. It’s very, very bad. It basically teaches men not to take “no” for an answer, and to pursue in the face of requests to desist. This “game” should not be given a platform, and I already trust Steam less because it’s been available for some time now. Sony’s PlayStation has done the right thing in not publishing this. Good on them.
So, if Valve does remove games from Steam for various reasons, then I see no reason why they should permit this. If they don’t want sexual content, it’s like Seduce Me. If they don’t want hostility towards their customers, they need to remember that women use Steam too. If normalizing the stalking behaviour advocated by the incredibly toxic PUA community is acceptable under their terms and conditions, it’s time to make a change. If they are not willing to do this, it is time to reconsider how much we trust their platform. And as I wrote a few weeks ago, everything runs on trust. There was a video game industry before Steam. There will probably be one after Steam. How long that period of time is may depend on how much we can trust the content on their platform.
Generally, I assume that the average reader of Almost Infinite is somewhat well-versed in video games and gaming culture. That makes some parts of my writing very easy, because a lot of you will understand what I’m talking about without me going into what feels like extraneous detail. While my Steam library admittedly contains some really weird options, chances are a few of you have played a few of the games I’ve already covered. If I’m being perfectly honest, chances are that a lot of you have probably played the game in question.
Today is one of those rare days that I really hope you aren’t familiar with the game I’m talking about. I am actually quite excited by the prospect of introducing something completely new to even a small minority of our readers, because Mass Effect really is something you should jump into blind.
Can we take a second to appreciate this wordmark? The font, the planetary curve, just… yay.
I’m not entirely sure why I chose to tackle my Steam library in random order. Variety perhaps. For the most part, this hasn’t negatively affected how I play these games. After all, most of the games I’ve played have been relatively self-contained. One doesn’t always need to play the preceding games in the series to understand what is happening in current game.
However, I think I would rather not be dropped in the middle of a story-arc as complicated as that of Half-Life.
Welp, you don’t always get what you want. Welcome to the confusingly titled Half-Life 2: Episode 1.
It is possible that loCity 17 has seen better days.
