Surely there’s nothing a board game can do that a video game can’t do better, right?
After all, board games are so limited. You have to fit them on a table, and make them out of real, tangible stuff. Video games can do whatever you can imagine!
And the best video games should already be stealing from board games. I think game designers ought to be out-and-out burglars, pausing their larceny only to remix and rethink the latest haul of ideas.
But there are also things that make board and card games great that can’t be stolen. At least, not yet. Those elements that exist only within the sphere of real-life cards, smiles and dining room tables.
Bluffing
Whether it’s lying to someone’s face in Werewolf or feigning an offensive in a war game, bluffing and duplicity provides almost all table games with a low-level electric current. It even shows up in board games’ most benign fiefdoms: German games like Settlers of Catan or Caverna, while ostensibly about the construction of peaceful settlements, will still see players protesting the fact that they’re doing well to stop the table from uniting against them by snatching away resources that they need. We do this constantly, and we do it because it’s fun.
It’s not that video games can’t do bluffing. From Street Fighter to StarCraft to Online Poker to EVE Online, you’ll find feints and deception, and I’ll drop anything to discuss Ubisoft’s beautiful failure Ruse. It’s just that video games are terrible at it. AI opponents are notoriously crap at bluffing, and lying over an internet connection is about as much fun as anything else in a long-distance relationship.
It’s not just that video games lose out on the joy of table talk. More significant is that they lose out entirely on the phenomenal genre of lying games. The Resistance is a contemporary example. Players all represent a group of people that must elect teams to go on missions, but which has been infiltrated by players which are double agents. Through failed missions and interrogations, the good guys have to figure out who they can trust before the bad guys sabotage three missions.
The Resistance is an exhausting, emotional and terrifying journey, and an incredible game. But if you’d prefer something more slapstick, Spyfall is a new release that’s also making waves. In each of its rounds, one player around the table has no idea where they are, while everybody else is told the location and their job within it. In a laughably evasive and bizarre conversation the players must try and work out who the spy is, while the spy has to try and deduce where the hell they are from everyone else’s answers. It’s one part James Bond, one part Monty Python and absolutely hilarious.
One of the reasons put forward for the 21st century resurgence of board games pairs them up with vinyl records. In an increasingly digital culture we long for something tangible to lavish affection on, collect, customise or lend. Many board gamers will write when they played and who won on the inside of the box lid, slowly turning a board game into a happy memory-jogging memento. I’ve recently started playing Infinity, and the discovery among my friends that as adults we have the patience to be passable painters is staggering.
But it’s not just that in existing as real-life objects, board games can be desirable in all-new ways. It’s also offers radically different opportunities for designers.
Rampage (also known as Terror in Meeple City) is an on-the-nose example, but it’ll do. This is a turn-based dexterity game that sees players racing to demolish a 3D city by flicking their personal godzilla-like monster around, chucking tiny wooden cars at one another, even placing their chin next to their monster and blowing as hard as they can. It’s very silly. But when a game works mostly within the rules of our human bodies and the laws of physics, as this does, you also instantly get incredible complexity with hardly any rules at all.
Two Rooms and a Boom makes use of space on a much larger scale. It’s a party game that divides players between two rooms, then allows tense hostage exchanges over the course of 15 minutes, after which a bomber player blows up, hopefully killing the president on the opposite team. Most of the game is talking (or more accurately, plotting, scheming, panicking and misleading), but where you’re standing, whether you can get privacy and your ability to read a room is vitally important.
Then there’s 2012’s Risk Legacy. Part board game, part advent calendar, this was a hugely successful reinterpretation of Risk that has players telling the story of their personal sci-fi world through consecutive games of Risk. From night to night players found megacities (scribbling their names on the board), place stickers showing which countries were eradicated, unpack new cards, unseal new, secret compartments in the box and even tear up existing components. By the end of the campaign your game would be utterly unique, and a treasured reminder of what a wonderful war you’d had.
All board games allow players their creative streak, because the rules can be bent or broken wherever you like. “Modding” is the process of painstakingly tweaking or repurposing video games, and the way I like to put it is that every board games ships with the most powerful mod tools imaginable. Rather than sulking when they play a bad game, a table of board gamers will leap on the design like amateur mechanics. “How can we fix this?”
It was actually Dungeons & Dragons that first let me perform game design. Cracking open hardback books almost as tall as my torso I’d sketch stories, draft dungeons, sprinkle treasure and attach far too many details to my pet antagonist (he was so troubled). Pen and paper roleplaying games are what I want to talk about here. Did you know they’ve evolved into a staggeringly broad and thought-provoking genre?
Let me illustrate just how much D&D has evolved. Monsters Hearts puts players in control of literally monstrous, sex-starved teenagers. Kaleidoscope sees players creating a fictitious arthouse film together, in less time than it would take to watch one. Fiasco remains the scene’s breakthrough hit, allowing players to thread together a Coen brothers-style disaster in a game that’s one-part improv, one-part dicking over your friends. Or perhaps you’re in the mood for something more serious? Night Witches is by the very same publisher, and casts players as members of a real-life second world war Soviet bomber regiment made up of women flying outmoded planes.
Picking the protagonist’s haircut and picking our way along some (mostly illusory) forking plots are as far as RPG video games go in offering players control. Next to pen and paper games, that’s the narrative equivalent of letting us reach over in the car to beep the horn. Not only do pen and paper RPGs let us create every facet of a whole cast of characters, they let us create the story.
Monday, October 12, 2015
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Breasts: the ultimate weapons
Forget guns. Forget nukes. The real ultimate weapon? Breasts.
Exposed breasts are a significant tactical advantage. In pop culture, large-breasted women fighters invariably wear very revealing, breast-emphasising outfits. There are numerous examples in comics (Wonder Woman, Power Girl,Psylocke, Emma Frost, Zatanna, Black Cat, She Hulk etc.) and video games (Lara Croft, Bayonetta, Blaze, Ivy, Rayne, Mai etc.) Presumably such capable individuals would be able to wear what they like, so why would they choose to expose so much skin to danger?
You might think it’s just a cheap and crude tactic by male-dominated industries to get more attention from what they assume to be their young heterosexual male audience. But you’d be wrong. The creators of these scantily-clad protagonists are aware of a greater truth; breasts are actually the most awesome weapons a human can possess, and to cover them up limits their effectiveness. No wonder there are games dedicated to women increasing their breast size. This may all seem far-fetched, but the science backs it up.
Exposed breasts are a significant tactical advantage. In pop culture, large-breasted women fighters invariably wear very revealing, breast-emphasising outfits. There are numerous examples in comics (Wonder Woman, Power Girl,Psylocke, Emma Frost, Zatanna, Black Cat, She Hulk etc.) and video games (Lara Croft, Bayonetta, Blaze, Ivy, Rayne, Mai etc.) Presumably such capable individuals would be able to wear what they like, so why would they choose to expose so much skin to danger?
You might think it’s just a cheap and crude tactic by male-dominated industries to get more attention from what they assume to be their young heterosexual male audience. But you’d be wrong. The creators of these scantily-clad protagonists are aware of a greater truth; breasts are actually the most awesome weapons a human can possess, and to cover them up limits their effectiveness. No wonder there are games dedicated to women increasing their breast size. This may all seem far-fetched, but the science backs it up.
Stability
Many women complain that large breasts are actually a hindrance to physical activity, requiring supporting equipment like sturdy sports bras to stop all the disruptive movement. However, this just reveals that these women haven’t had sufficient training in using breasts to maintain stability in extreme physical scenarios.
When undulated in the correct manner, large breasts can act as tuned mass dampers, aka harmonic absorbers. By swinging in the opposite direction to that of the main body, breasts can help cancel out the effect of external forces, like the large pendulum-like dampers in skyscrapers and wind turbines. Ergo, large breasts reduce the impact of hits sustained in battle, allowing the female combatant to remain standing and retaliate in kind.
More proficient female fighters have also mastered their breast to achieve rotational movements to induce a gyroscopic effect, allowing them to put their body through extremely elaborate moves and actions, without ever losing their balance. An obvious tactical advantage.
Offensive capabilities
Human breasts are ostensibly there to house mammary glands, which produce milk for the feeding of babies. This is fine, but this child rearing only ever takes up a few years of an adult woman’s life, assuming she opts to have any children at all. So why do women have breasts on a permanent basis?
Outside of child rearing, breasts actually produce a powerful corrosive acid, like hydrochloric acid in the stomach but much worse, strong enough to dissolve the flesh from an enemies bones and, given enough time, capable of burning through most refined metals.
Specific changes in diet can alter the nature of the fluid produced by breasts. It requires great discipline but some women can use their breasts to produce and emit highly-toxic venom like a cobra. Alternatively, a greater consumption of more-spicy foodstuffs can result in the production of a napalm-like substance.
The more of this weaponised fluid is stored, the more pressure it is under and the further it can be excreted. This causes breasts to expand, which explains why so many female combatants have such large, turgid breasts in defiance of the usual restrictions of anatomy.
However, this does mean the nipple and areola areas are “weak spots” on breasts, as they have to allow openings for fluid to escape. They also look a bit like a target too. This is why these are always covered, even if nothing else is. It’s not to avoid some arbitrary threshold of offensiveness to not get in trouble, it’s to not reveal the Achilles heel. Except it’s not a heel, it’s a nipple.
Many women complain that large breasts are actually a hindrance to physical activity, requiring supporting equipment like sturdy sports bras to stop all the disruptive movement. However, this just reveals that these women haven’t had sufficient training in using breasts to maintain stability in extreme physical scenarios.
When undulated in the correct manner, large breasts can act as tuned mass dampers, aka harmonic absorbers. By swinging in the opposite direction to that of the main body, breasts can help cancel out the effect of external forces, like the large pendulum-like dampers in skyscrapers and wind turbines. Ergo, large breasts reduce the impact of hits sustained in battle, allowing the female combatant to remain standing and retaliate in kind.
More proficient female fighters have also mastered their breast to achieve rotational movements to induce a gyroscopic effect, allowing them to put their body through extremely elaborate moves and actions, without ever losing their balance. An obvious tactical advantage.
Offensive capabilities
Human breasts are ostensibly there to house mammary glands, which produce milk for the feeding of babies. This is fine, but this child rearing only ever takes up a few years of an adult woman’s life, assuming she opts to have any children at all. So why do women have breasts on a permanent basis?
Outside of child rearing, breasts actually produce a powerful corrosive acid, like hydrochloric acid in the stomach but much worse, strong enough to dissolve the flesh from an enemies bones and, given enough time, capable of burning through most refined metals.
Specific changes in diet can alter the nature of the fluid produced by breasts. It requires great discipline but some women can use their breasts to produce and emit highly-toxic venom like a cobra. Alternatively, a greater consumption of more-spicy foodstuffs can result in the production of a napalm-like substance.
The more of this weaponised fluid is stored, the more pressure it is under and the further it can be excreted. This causes breasts to expand, which explains why so many female combatants have such large, turgid breasts in defiance of the usual restrictions of anatomy.
However, this does mean the nipple and areola areas are “weak spots” on breasts, as they have to allow openings for fluid to escape. They also look a bit like a target too. This is why these are always covered, even if nothing else is. It’s not to avoid some arbitrary threshold of offensiveness to not get in trouble, it’s to not reveal the Achilles heel. Except it’s not a heel, it’s a nipple.
The alternative physics of breasts
Breasts don’t obey the usual laws of physics. Video game makers figured this out long ago, which is why breasts in video games often behave in such surreal ways.
This is because breasts extrude into as lightly different dimension, one visible from ours that we can still interact with, but with its own subtly different properties and physics.
For instance, size and mass fluctuate more often in the breast dimension, hence bra measuring is so imprecise; the breasts are actually shifting in size and shape constantly due to their exotic physics.
The gyroscopic properties and ability to store highly dangerous fluids are also results of the unique physics of breasts, but it also provides a distinct defensive property. Bullets and blades are very dangerous to humans due to the laws of conventional physics, but breasts don’t obey these laws, so are practically invulnerable to traditional weapons. You seldom see any of these comic or game characters with damaged breasts, and now you know why.
And if they’re invulnerable, there’s no real point in covering them with clothes. Clothes are damageable, so you’ll just ruin a good outfit.
As a result of all this, many women find breasts incredibly useful in combat situations, as writer and gamer Emma Boyle points out.
“Female gamers have long since known that we have an unfair advantage over our male counterparts. I’ve found that if my cleavage is large enough, it becomes an excellent place to store my collection of ninja throwing stars, a spare handgun, and a fighter jet. In fact, I don’t dare to use this move often, but the quasi-religious power of my breasts means that revealing even one nipple will result in face-melting scenes akin to the opening of the Ark of the Covenant.”
It’s not all advantageous though. Having such potent weapons attached to your chest all-day every-day is obviously going to have drawbacks, and they can sometimes become unmanageable and incredibly dangerous, as Gadgette editorHolly Brockwell discovered.
“Having giant boobs was a huge problem for me. Not just because of the vexing back and neck strain, but because it was like having two nuclear warheads strapped to my chest. It was the day they almost took out a school bus full of small children that I realised they had to go for the safety of the planet - so I booked myself in for unilateral disarmament and have never looked back”
People may read this piece and think “None of this is true. This is ludicrous!” And they’d be right. But when we’re at a point where a female characters in a modern video game wears revealing clothes because she’s literally photosynthetic, ludicrousness is sometime the only appropriate response.
Breasts don’t obey the usual laws of physics. Video game makers figured this out long ago, which is why breasts in video games often behave in such surreal ways.
This is because breasts extrude into as lightly different dimension, one visible from ours that we can still interact with, but with its own subtly different properties and physics.
For instance, size and mass fluctuate more often in the breast dimension, hence bra measuring is so imprecise; the breasts are actually shifting in size and shape constantly due to their exotic physics.
The gyroscopic properties and ability to store highly dangerous fluids are also results of the unique physics of breasts, but it also provides a distinct defensive property. Bullets and blades are very dangerous to humans due to the laws of conventional physics, but breasts don’t obey these laws, so are practically invulnerable to traditional weapons. You seldom see any of these comic or game characters with damaged breasts, and now you know why.
And if they’re invulnerable, there’s no real point in covering them with clothes. Clothes are damageable, so you’ll just ruin a good outfit.
As a result of all this, many women find breasts incredibly useful in combat situations, as writer and gamer Emma Boyle points out.
“Female gamers have long since known that we have an unfair advantage over our male counterparts. I’ve found that if my cleavage is large enough, it becomes an excellent place to store my collection of ninja throwing stars, a spare handgun, and a fighter jet. In fact, I don’t dare to use this move often, but the quasi-religious power of my breasts means that revealing even one nipple will result in face-melting scenes akin to the opening of the Ark of the Covenant.”
It’s not all advantageous though. Having such potent weapons attached to your chest all-day every-day is obviously going to have drawbacks, and they can sometimes become unmanageable and incredibly dangerous, as Gadgette editorHolly Brockwell discovered.
“Having giant boobs was a huge problem for me. Not just because of the vexing back and neck strain, but because it was like having two nuclear warheads strapped to my chest. It was the day they almost took out a school bus full of small children that I realised they had to go for the safety of the planet - so I booked myself in for unilateral disarmament and have never looked back”
People may read this piece and think “None of this is true. This is ludicrous!” And they’d be right. But when we’re at a point where a female characters in a modern video game wears revealing clothes because she’s literally photosynthetic, ludicrousness is sometime the only appropriate response.
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