I have never played a Pokemon game. Nope, not even Pokemon Go. I do not like JRPGs and I never got into it as a kid, which is the time I think most fans started playing. (Side note my cousin Trent was once the world champ of the Pokemon card game). That being said I am fascinated with the controversy following Pokemon Sword and Shield, and how angry everyone was after they reused models and left some pokémon out. I watched the Arlo video on the controversy to educate myself on the whole issue. This is the video I used for reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5skcy9AT4pw along with the other videos he posted which I had watched in the past. 

To start, I don’t know why Pokemon releases two games that are essentially the same at the same time. But I will try to explain this the best I can sorry if I get colloquial I’m not a good narrative writer. So…. Pokemon announces a new game (games?) which is a big deal because it would be on switch so its an HD game. They will not include all pokemon because they wanted to build new models, which takes a lot of time considering there are about 5000 of those beasts. Many fans were disappointed but most understood. However, before the game came out some ardent fans found that they did reuse models and lied. So now they were pissed, because if they were reusing models why didn’t they include all pokemon? Why not rebuild the models. 

Here are my final takes on this situation. People were not mad about the game models, they were mad about them, but it wasn’t all about them. Instead this was just the last straw for many pokemon fans who have seen a game series they love stay stuck mechanically and visually in the late 1990s. While Zelda matured into BOTW and Mario matured into Mario Odyssey. Pokemon, because of GameFreak and other reasons, has stayed exactly the same. So while pokemon fans may have seemed irrational, it’s the larger implication of lazy developers which made them so angry. 

The best twitter community is queer and trans individuals, who for some reason love Nintendo. This response will examine the seemingly juxtaposed sides of Gaymers who love Nintendo and how Nintendo rejects these players.  The pinnacle of this to me is Adam Moussa, he is an editor (I think?) at eater and used to be at Polygon he is notable for his appearance in Brian David Gilbert’s video creating every food item and dish in Breath of the Wild. However, I discovered him by his tweets specifically relating to video games, applying gay subculture to games like Breath of the Wild. This is an interesting community because Nintendo very very rarely attempts to reach out to this community. However, my entire life I have found many of my queer friends and myself very fond of Nintendo games. Even very recently Nintendo has flat-out denied that animal crossing characters are gay—even though they’re obviously gay. Queer people love Nintendo but Nintendo is pretty lacks any representation of gay characters. 

Instead of shunning Nintendo and playing games with queer and trans representation, gaymers have created their own culture within Nintendo games—through social media, fanfiction and reddit communities like /r/gaymers. One issue raised in the article “Why Nintendo Is So Important to Queer Folks” is the like of harassment in nintendo games.  The author writes, “When that harassment is compounded with homophobic, transphobic, racist or sexist words, it can feel impossible to play certain games. However, with the lack of voice chat in Nintendo’s online games, this problem is dramatically lessened.” So because Nintendo is less adept at online—more queer players can exist without hearing slurs directed at them while trying to play a game. Yet, to me this does not answer the question. I’ve asked many of my queer friends about this and almost all of them played Nintendo growing up, very few got into Playstation or Xbox and most started playing video games with an N64 or Gamecube or DS. Honestly I do not think there’s a true reason for this, maybe it’s coincidence. But in a world increasingly including queer characters, queer stories, and queer developers. It is interesting that a game company that is often homophobic and stays away from “forced diversity,” as douchebags on reddit call it, is one of the most treasured video game companies for queer individuals. 

I have about the same opinions on this documentary as I did on the Anita Sarkeesian video we watched earlier in the semester. I thought that while the points it made were true and good. It did not go far enough. To me, I did not need the first ten minutes justifying that video games are in fact sexist. Now this is not to say that this documentary is not valuable or that I am some all knowing feminist hero, neither of those things is true. But rather, I fall into what Sarkeesian says her videos weren’t for, people in academia with access to books and articles about feminist and gender theory. I also am a huge fan of video games who reads and watches articles and videos about video games and feminism. So gamergate and the casual of sexism of video game culture is not new to me either. I know this is a very silly critique, and to contradict this critique entirely, this document would be excellent to show to those whose knowledge of video games is great and feminism is lacking. There needs to be much better education for men who play video games. 

I also do not like how this documentary talked about queer and trans individuals. While I can not speak for the whole movement, as a bi guy, some of the things they said about queer players felt like the same old shit we’ve been marketed for years. Like queer players don’t want to just be queer characters. This was a little reductionist, especially in an industry that often uses queer stories and characters as marketing opportunities. Maybe this is a rant I have more with the industry and not the documentary. But it felt like they shoehorned LGBTQIA issues into these documentary. Along with this, I think that trans women were not addressed at all in this documentary and I think that needs to be more prevalent in any feminist critique or text about video games. 

What made this documentary great is the many harrowing stories of women developers and gamers who have been harassed and had their careers destroyed by toxic male fanbases. Overall I really liked this documentary and I hate to overly critique it, it’s just easier to write critiques than praises. 

After reading “Whose Game is this Anyway?” from Play Between Worlds I was jarred. Not because any of this information was new—any person who has spent time in an MMO, or game forums knows that people sell their characters, that copyright battles are often ridiculous and dirty. However, this article was written in a way that made all the comments on blogs, all the videos by regular people (and large media conglomerates) seem ridiculous. One section which points out how people argue the market will sort out the game industry, Taylor writes that  “Problems raised around intellectual property and player engagement can be solved through the marker … strikes me as naive” (Taylor 144).  While I have previously have thought this as a silly concept, I am not super into the idea of free market capitalism, it is crazy how many times I have seen and heard takes like these from you tubers like Arlo. 

I also was really interested in the discussion of artistic intent and an idea of an auteur in game development. I have fallen into this trope many times, attributing the success of a game to it’s director without acknowledging that video games (or any games for that matter) are these corporate productions. There is very little artistic intention in games which are the products of corporations. To be clear, I am not saying that video games are not without artistic merit; however, video games are often highly marketed, highly legally scrutinized, money making machines. While any form of art—whether that be literature or painting or film—in the modern world is tied directly to the profit margins it creates, video games are often on another level. This question is complicated by the players. I recently watched a Polygon video about a Minecraft player who built a gameboy that could play Pokemon in Minecraft. Who then is the artist, who is the auteur? Is it the player who placed these Pokemon in Minecraft? Is it Gunpei Yokoi? Is it the designers and developers of Pokemon? (It isn’t Notch because he’s a shitty person.) Video games, in regards to copyright, ownership, and art is completely new and alien. 

I wasn’t sure if I needed a blog post, I attached the GDD to the announcement, but it’s available here as well.

Our development team Team #3 is excited to announce our production of the game The Revenge of Flynt Westwood. Our game derives influence from the point and click games of the 1990s and seeks to expand on that formula in a western setting. We are targeting players who played those games but also their younger sibling and children, we hope to make this game more accessible to all but it’s more of an adult game. While we would like a larger more expansive game, this will just be a Twine outline. Attached to this announcement is our GDD which will provide more information on what we want to do.

During this time of quarantine, my roommates and I have been playing board games every single night. We only have a couple of board games, so things can get very dull quickly. Because of this our games of monopoly have so many house rules now that they have become nothing like the real games, for this assignment we establish set “house rules” 1. If you declare bankruptcy, you do not give your tiles to the player who made you bankrupt but rather back into the deck. 2. All fines go into the middle for free parking. 3. You can trade with anyone at time. 4. Free rent is possible (make this trade with me, never pay on that spot again. This made the game much more chaotic. When players died, which one did fairly one in monopoly standards, it completley changed the game. New Monopolies were up for grabs. Shifting who was in the lead. The free parking space is a classic monopoly house rule, but it completley changed our game. Almost no one landed on the free parking space and, towards the end of the game, the space had a little over 1,000 dollars on it. Whoever got that space could make a game ending monopoly. The person who was losing the game got the space and it kept them in a little longer. Overall, our rules made the game longer, but much more chaotic in length. The game was not over too quickly like in many usual games of monopoly where one player has won after only a few times around the board and there is no coming back to best them. I think this made the game less strategic, and in that way for me, it was less fun than just playing regular monopoly. I think for players who enjoy games where there is no possible strategy, just complete luck, like the game of life or candyland, they would enjoy monopoly a lot more. Because it makes the game less stressful in that way. It also makes for a fun change of pace. Monopoly can become the same game over and over, especially with the same number of players, but when players have free ride passes and anyone could win 1,000 dollars completley changes how the game is played and what you are looking for. I reccomend this strategy to those who hate monopoly, but have played it far too many times, and those who love monopoly, but have played it far too many times. It is not an easy game to learn if you’ve never played, and to place chaotic rules would only make it harder.

I am probably pretentious in all things I do. I try to read books which will stimulate me, I will only play video games with a 90+ on metacritic, yada yada yada. That being said, in my deepest folder of my phone, I keep the worst game I play. It is called Idle Miner and it is exactly what you would expect. It is an idle game, which is not an inherently bad genre, but it is the perfect example of a bad idle game. The game relies on waiting long periods to advance, costs money if you want to not wait, and shows incessant advertisements. It is a game I would, usually, delete immediatley. However, despite its major flaws, I keep playing. This is likely because it was designed to be addictive and keep me playing. I want to build more mines, which costs money, but by making a new mine I get more money. There are managers and more mines to build. The game has more content than Super Mario Tennis. It keeps me engaged by providing more and more to do. Now, I’ve reached a point where there is little to do but wait. However, because I have spent so much time, luckily I am not gullible enough to spend money on the game, I now feel like deleting the app would prove my time wasted. The game literally uses the sunk cost fallacy to keep me playing even when I am literally out of things to do in the game. This is probably an economic mechanic too, if I can’t do anything I want to spend money on the game. To keep players playing when we reach this point in the game, the app also provides daily rewards for checking in. The game was designed to be addictive and I have fallen for its trap. I don’t know if it’s fun, but I will keep playing.

I used photoshop to create fake poster advertising Phoenix and my game.

I have started replaying Breath of the Wild for the third time, second time in master mode, I am having fun trying to gain hearts and stamina while avoiding the mainquest and might go after Ganon with no main events done.