Can I Tempt You To A Little Something?

There was an unusual flurry of interest in accountancy this week as Steam added the ability to tally purchase history by value. Or something. No-one seemed entirely clear about the details.

Isey had a nice post up in which a few people outed themselves as overspenders. I revealed my own Steam Spend in a moment of self-satisfied smugness which, with a singular lack of taste or decorum, I am about to repeat here:

TotalSpend 2018-03-30 20:59:13.053 $57.06

OldSpend 2018-03-30 20:59:13.053 $0.00

PWSpend 2018-03-30 20:59:13.053 $0.00

Time was, I could have demurred entirely, saying even more smugly "I don't do Steam" but those days are long gone. We all fall in the end. Nonetheless, I was a very late adopter, coming to Valve's warehouse of shame long after it ceased to be fashionable, let alone faddish.

By the time I joined even the (in)famous Steam Sales were slipping into self-parody, with blog posts tending towards the jaded or nostalgic as people vied to compete over how little they'd seen to tempt them rather than how full their imaginary bags had been as they exited the store. These days, if anyone even mentions Steam, it's only to bemoan its failings. It's a background hum at best.

Indeed, it's only as I log into Steam to check some things for this post that I find the Steam Summer Sale started two days ago. A few years ago the blogosphere would have been sparking like a summer storm with posts about who'd bought what. This time I haven't seen a single mention.

With no history of wild sale frenzy behind me, I don't have one of those long tail "unplayed games" lists that seem to invoke the weird inverted work ethic that dogs so many bloggers. How it's possible to generate puritanical guilt by not playing video games beats me but for a while it very much seemed to be a thing around here. Even that has faded.

It may be an isotope of Buyer's Remorse, something I don't generally suffer from over anything much, least of all games. Buyer's Irritation, occasionally, when what I get turns out to be not what I wanted, but I think for remorse you need to feel a large degree of responsibility for your actions. I would always rather lay that off on whoever sold the crappy thing to me than take it on myself. I do my research before I buy so I expect to be satisfied.

Still, I have learned rather quickly that money spent on Steam is generally money wasted. Not because of the quality of the product - there may be a vast underbelly of slush but the stuff floating to the top seems quality enough. It's more that it's very hard not to notice that there are a lot of free video games around these days. Why pay for something you can have for nothing?

I do still subscribe somewhat to the old saw that says "you get what you pay for" but I think it's important to factor in a clear consideration of what it is that you wanted in the first place. If it's something substantial, something that's going to look good, play well and keep you fully engaged and entertained for several weeks then yes, you probably do need to pay up front. 

If you're already over-extended on existing games - and anyone still emotionally and intellectually invested in more than one MMORPG is inevitably going to have that problem - then  any yearning for a brief burst of novelty dopamine should be easily satisfied without recourse to a credit card.

Similarly, if you just need to fill a session here and there but you prefer to travel first-class then many full-price games have teasers or intros that can be played for free. In the same way that I find I only need to read the opening paragraphs of most magazine articles or that a couple of pages in the Sunday Supplement of a quality newspaper tells me as much as I want to know about a subject that someone's just written a 300 page book about, I often find those free tasters enough to sate my appetite for a particular game.

Then there's the issue of MMORPG habituation. As many MMO players have found, once you go big you can't go back. Single player games just feel odd. They don't seem real, somehow, which, given the innate irreality of video-gaming, is a disconnect too far for me. I find I can invest much more easily and settle more deeply into a bad MMO than a good single-player these days. I think MMOs have re-wired my neural pathways - and that may not even be as fanciful as it sounds.

Best success for me these days certainly doesn't stem from trying to find offline (or, more likely, online-alone) games that replicate MMO gameplay. I thought that would be a path to self-sufficiency but it's not as the virtual dust and cobwebs obscuring the icons on my desktop leading to Tanzia and Yonder confirm.

I'm coming around to the theory that if I'm to play any non-MMOs I need to focus on games that are short, have a definitive end-point and a clear, linear narrative. I finished and enjoyed Dr Langeskov, The Tiger and the Terribly Cursed Emerald which took about an hour. I finished and wasn't especially impressed by A Raven Monologue, which took half that time.


Doki Doki Literature Club I enjoyed most of all and that took several sessions of an hour or two. It's theoretically quite replayable and plenty of people have replayed it many times to tease out all the narrative possibilities. I'm not so keen on doing that, although I understand the theoretical appeal.

My problem with gaming as a delivery platform for narrative comes down to one of efficiency. I'm not convinced that the pay-off from interactivity is commensurate with the extra time and inconvenience. Having to replay games to see different outcomes strikes me as the equivalent of watching a movie or re-reading a novel a dozen times. Few adults are interested in doing that although it's a common practice in childhood (and academia).

It seems to me that both plain text and the moving image do a better job of creating immersion and involvement with character and story than having to manipulate avatars through activities. It's no co-incidence that the most successful narrative experiences in gaming have earned the pejorative generic of  "walking simulators". The less the player has to do, the more the narrative can shine.

Maybe this will change when virtual reality sheds its gadgetry and goes mainstream. I still tend to doubt it. There's a big difference between the Secret Cinema experience or Puzzle Rooms and just watching a movie or reading a thriller. Most people are lazy. I know I am.

All the same, when it comes to playing non-MMOs I am thinking of focusing my attention in that direction. I still have £10 credit on Steam from the IntPiPoMo prize last year and I might spend £3.99 of it on Life Is Strange 1-5, currently on sale at 75% off. Or I might just buy another MMO - The Division is 80% off at £8.39.

Neither of those games is new, of course. The big advantage of falling behind is that there's a lot to fall on. Despite all this talk of Steam, however, it was my Amazon Prime membership that got me out of the MMO groove this last week.

Just after I got back from holiday, someone in my Feedly (shamefully I can't recall who it was and can't now find the post) alerted me to the addition of a monthly gaming offer on Amazon Prime. It actually began a month or two back and the games change from month to month.

This month there were two that interested me - The Banner Saga and The Banner Saga 2. These are both titles I knew about and have occasionally pondered playing. The combination of "free but only for a month" was sufficient to trigger me and I downloaded them both.

I've played the first for several hours and its...okay. It certainly looks good, the plot is moderately involving and I like some of the characters. The combat seems both intrusive and awkward. Mechanically it keeps reminding me of Pirate 101, which works in a very similar way but is far more exciting. Structurally, the fights just get in the way of the narrative.

I was going at it quite hard, playing an hour or two each evening after I'd finished my GW2 dailies, but I missed one night and since then I haven't logged in again. The story isn't that interesting, the much-vaunted writing isn't always as fluid or convincing as it could be and the voice acting is a little off-putting on the sporadic occasions it occurs. I think accents are best avoided, by and large, unless it's comedy value you're after.

I probably will finish it eventually, if only because I've read that the sequel is an improvement in most respects so I'd like to try that. If not, well, it was free and there'll be something else on Prime in a couple of weeks.

Spoilt for choice I guess. Or just spoiled. That's the real problem here and Steam has a lot to answer for or so it's often said.

Still, we wouldn't want to be without it, eh? Would we?

The Right Prescription

Every single post on Inventory Full, well over a thousand now, carries the tag "MMO". When I started writing here, back in 2011, almost every blog I read was much the same - all MMOs, all the time.

Over the years that's changed a lot. Glancing at my blogroll, there's almost no-one left who writes only about MMOs. There's Telwyn, whose "Categories" list includes nothing but MMOs (except "Uncategorized" but now we're getting meta). I think Shintar may only write about SW:tOR, which would make hers the only single-MMO blog I follow. And there's Bhelgast, who writes about a lot of non-gaming stuff but only MMOs as far as gaming goes...

A lot of bloggers still write more about MMOs than any other kind of game - Syp, Wilhelm, Isey, UltrViolet... too many to list, really - but mostly these days it's a mixed diet of MMOs, co-ops and single player stuff. Which is fine. My interest lies more in the quality of the writing than the topic anyway - I enjoyed Tipa's blogging on bridges as much as her MMO coverage, for example, but then I'd just be happy to see Tipa back blogging about anything.

If I was going to start blogging about anything other than MMOs I would move away from gaming completely. Most likely to music (which would give me a chance to enthuse openly instead of just dropping allusions no-one will ever get into blog titles) or books (since I get to read a wealth of wonderful stuff six months to a year before it's published) or even movies (although for that I'd have to start going to the cinema again, I guess...).

When it does come to gaming, though, even I stray from the true path sometimes. I bought two single-player games this year: Tanzia and Yonder. They both play like MMORPGs, which is what drew me to them and was how I justified hanging an "MMO" tag on the posts I wrote about them.

I enjoyed them both, for a while. A short while. I don't have buyer's regret because they were cheap and I got my money's worth, but although I enjoyed the gameplay in both I found it utterly impossible to maintain my interest, knowing I was playing alone.

It's hard to explain. Many have tried. In these days of solo MMOs, which is pretty much all of them if that's how you choose to play it, there's little logic to why doing exactly the same things has such a different emotional heft, but it does.

Grinding xp or farming mats in a single player feels...well, let's be quite brutal...it feels idiotic. Tanzia and Yonder both feature those mechanics, which I enjoy in MMOs, but I had to stop playing because I began to feel that what I was doing had no function, purpose or meaning. After a few sessions I felt I would quite literally be better off spending my time staring out of the window, let alone getting up and going and doing something useful.

To do exactly the same thing in an MMO feels completely different. Even in an MMO where no-one else appears to be playing, one where I know not a single person, where I'm in no guild or group, where the chat channels are silent for hours on end so it feels as though I might be the last person left playing.

Indeed, I sometimes feel it literally would not matter if I was the only person left playing. I know that someone else could be playing and that's all that's needed to make it a social experience not a solitary one.

So, after a couple of noble but failed experiments, I'm trying not to buy any non-MMOs, even if bloggers I read are singing their praises and they do sound like something I'd enjoy. But, what if the game in question happened to be free? And what if it only took twenty minutes to play?

Last night I read a typically entertaining post at The Forbidden Codex of The Pink Beyond. Xyzzysqrl covers such an infinitude of games so amusingly and authoritatively that I mostly feel no need to try them for myself but this one was a little different, because all Gordy was prepared to say about it was this:

"I cannot tell you anything about this game, as it would ruin the experience, and in fact the mere knowledge that I cannot tell you anything about this game is already ruining a small part of the experience for you, for which I apologize profusely"

The game in question is called  "Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist". It's available as a free download (donations accepted) direct from creators Crows Crows Crows  or you can get it free without guilt from Steam.

I played it last night. It took me more like half an hour than twenty minutes. I played it again this morning and it took me more like forty minutes than half an hour. It is linear but stands repeating at least once - possibly more than once.

More than that I shan't say. I don't think it is particularly the kind of game that would be ruined if you knew in advance what it was about but on the other hand, it takes twenty minutes to play (if you crack on) so if you want to know then you might as well just play it. Like I did.

I think even I could manage a few bite-sized games like this without the scaffolding of an imagined social structure to hold up my interest. I'll keep an eye out for a few more.

If you do play, one tip (not, I think, a spoiler): don't miss the tape-recorder. I didn't even see it first time round.