The GNamer Posts Appreciation Thread

Guys - I've found the real prototype design file:

It says here:
A) To recapture the "lifestytle" feel of the Wii and DS Lite era, the controller (it's a hybrid as well guys, good news) is going to be available in kitschy colours that you see in Next Home and that sort. There's this orange, pale blue and lime green.
B) The analogue sticks, D Pad and face buttons are now modular; you can swap their positions. This is an effort to silence whiny cry-babies who don't like where the sticks are on the WiiU GamePad. Later on, you'll be able to order custom faceplates, as well as trackballs, and one big Horii-style button. Wario Ware will have a game based on you swapping these out, like that 90s kids game with the shapes and the timer. You know the one.
C) Plus and minus are a decent size, so you can actually find the buggers
D) The TV remote button is now a funky hexagon
E) The most painful to press, but easiest to catch by mistake, power button you'll ever see
F) The home button is fun to press, so it's been made a bit bigger
G) Stereo speakers. (Not everything's a joke)
H) Releases fart smells instead of vibrating. (Sometimes things are)
I) Quicklaunch The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
J) Quicklaunch Rad Mobile
K) Etch-a-sketch mode (shake me properly)
L) L, ZL, R, ZR buttons - the Z versions are analogue again
M) ZZL, ZZZL, ZZR and ZZZR buttons - these are actually radio buttons - when you pop one in, the other pops out. This will be great in flight things like Starfox and Affordable Space Adventures.
N) Oh yeah the screen sorry
O) Microphone
P) 3D cameras. Because it was great having them on the WiiU
Q) Solar-powered LCD timer, showing the time before the next Zelda game is released.
Not seen from angle: Charger, headphone socket, RF output, cassette deck.

I can see why there are people who question its legitimacy as a game, with the standard arguments tending to go down the path of it not having a 'failure state' and player choices ultimately not affecting the ends. Firewatch and other titles clearly evoke a more cinematic experience than, say, Pokemon or Doom, and player agency is certainly diminished in comparison to something traditionally found on a cartridge. To that end, at the macro level, it seems plausible not call them games or at least label them as some other genre, but at the micro things break down.

People tend to like the failure state argument of games because it sets a precedent for what games do, or force players to do, that films or books don't. Ostensibly, Firewatch, Dear Esther, Her Story, and others don't have failure states. Except that they do, theirs simply don't state 'Game Over, Man.' The challenge of Firewatch is navigation. It's not a difficult challenge, and the lack of environmental breadth and interactivity also makes it an uninteresting one, but fundamentally it is a mechanical challenge that certain people will fail. It might well be that the only people who fail are people with learning or motor disabilities, but getting lost or being unable to navigate Firewatch is something which will deny a player story progression and ultimately the credits. In this manner, it's no different than a plethora of ye olde point and click games which, rather than demanding adequate navigative skill, required you to guess what combination of items the developer wanted rubbed together to trigger the next puzzle. Oftentimes these games didn't bother with a game over screen either, but nobody stigmatises them as being anything less than a game.

When it comes to the story choices not affecting the outcome, that's a perennial bug bear amongst many with games like Firewatch as well as Telltale games. My personal preference is like Mas' in that I'm happy to go through a game once, input my choices, and accept the result as cannon. It doesn't necesserily matter if the choices don't trigger, to lesser or greater degrees, plot permutations because I view these decisions as a means to role play the character I'm commanding. To that end, I think Firewatch does a good job of letting you define who Henry is. Although your choices don't significantly influence the mechanical ending, the point of them is to try and evoke a certain feeling based on user input over the course of three or four hours. That being said, I found the overall story beyond the interaction between Henry and Delia, disappointing, which meant that towards the end I stopped caring a great deal. Take something like The Walking Dead by Telltale though and you have another game where, if you actually mapped out every choice and its effects on a board, you'd be left with largely binary options at the end with a few optional subplots. I just don't think that matters in the end though because that first journey is what I'm playing these types of games for. I'm happy to buy into the illusion of choice as long as the story is interesting and the outcomes believable - the latter is just where Firewatch falls down towards the end.

I'm a bit of a fatalist though. I don't mind if when games force a certain fate on a player. If the writers want to make a certain point then I think that's fine as long as they do a good job in conveying it. Messing with player agency, forcing certain endings and the like can be effective tools in conveying a message. It's just that games as a story telling medium is ultimately a very recent phenomena and the industry is playing catch up to mediums that have a lot more experience, so sometimes these forced endings fall flat, or piss a lot of people off like in Mass effect 3.

All that being said, I can see why,although I'm happy to accept Firewatch's dialogue options as a gameplay tool for role playing purposes, there is the temptation for people to just watch a Let's Play. Although it's not their choices, if the options there don't do a good enough job of establishing varying roles for the player character at the very least, then the illusion of choice is shattered. The success of that illusion is always going to be quite subjective, but developers/writers are aware of that and the onus should be on them to make experiences matter enough to people individually to force them into actively participating with them rather than watching them.