Be Excellent To Each Other

Ok, so I was checking out Glass Museum's Nelly Furtado's Pro Cribbage Tournament, when I stumbled across this feature regarding one man's recreation of the first aeroplane flight over the Atlantic Ocean.



In it, he has a mock-discussion with a fly about the difference between 'good-boring' and 'bad-boring':



Is this possible? Can boredom be fun? Bluce_Ree has talked to me before of his enjoyment of 'grinding' 360 games out until he has eked out all 1000 achievement points from them. I myself can race NASCAR cars around oval tracks for hours at a time - this is inherently boring, but yet I still find it fun.

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I then read this set of features about a Russian RPG called Pathologic. Now, I don't have that much interest in RPGs, but this absolutely fascinated me (don't read the third article unless you plan to play the game).

From reading the articles, it seems to be the bleakest, darkest game that has ever been made. The author speaks about how utterly debilitating it is to play, but speaks of how the young games industry is still in its 'slapstick comedy' phase, as all games are made to be fun.

He likens Pathologic to Schindler's List, where an absolutely brilliant film garners completely negative emotions, but still doesn't have you think any less of it.

This has kind of turned into a bit of a ramble, but the articles fascinated me, and I wanted to see what your opinions were.

Oooh, good thread.

I think there is some worth in the idea of 'boring good.' But they are completely incompatible with real life. As i've become time poor as I've aged I've been pushed from enjoying something like FFVIII to find the very concept disgusting.

The whole real time silent hunter thing is really interesting, not for something you would ever want to do, but just for bringing up a different way games could work. Apparently there was a CSI mobile phone game which sent you real text messages, in real time about the cases. Things like that need to be explored.

And grind is a huge discussion and something that hits a certain bone in people, and I think it's a dead end we've been walking down in pursuit of 'value.'

As I commented in a feature in NGamer magazine. Grinding is not gameplay, it's gamelabour.

Excellent post. I'm glad I'm not the only one who has heard of Wrratt. I think he lives alone in darkest Scando-navia and has a fairly flexible job, and hence has hours upon hours to waste, which makes all this possible.

I am (or rather, was, to be explained) something of a sim freak myself. Most sim players I find tend to either be bored/curious or somewhat hardcore. The bored curious are those who borrow a copy of a sim (I'll use Flight Sim 2004 and Train Sim as my examples) off a friend because they want to see what it's all about. They then pick the 747/Flying Scotsman because they recognize them, and are completely unable to control them. They eventually relent and settle on the Learjet/Acela Express, have a few chuckles creating horrific crashes/derailments, and then never touch it again.

The somewhat hardcore, meanwhile, know what they're doing. However, they're mostly limited to doing a quick flight/activity which they know well. They fly a Beechcraft King Air from Leeds/Bradford to RAF St Athan/do the 'Hot Box' activity on Marias Pass and that's their lot. They get some enjoyment from it, but I'm not sure what.

That leaves two, much smaller groups: the hardcore, and the worrying.

The hardcore join a virtual airline. They do all their flights connected to a virtual air traffic control network like VATSIM. And they don't just do a quick circuit of an airfield, they fly proper long haul flights. In real time. I've done this. As mytoptika says, the satisfaction of throttling back your A321 as you descend to land is that much greater when you've just been flying over Spain for the last two hours - much more so than just loading up a preset approach that has you all positioned in midair and you just guide the plane down.

Trainsimmers, meanwhile, create and play ridiculously complex shunting activities, or drive hours-long freight and passenger runs the entire length of the ample routes provided by the game, or those they've downloaded or purchased online.

In both cases, a whole heap of community created custom content thousands of times more accurate than that included with the default game, is used. Missing stations are added to routes, along with better physics, textures, and sound effects. The crappy rendition of your local airport is easily replaced with a terrifyingly detailed version, while the almost empty skies are filled with thousands of real scheduled flights, all with authentic liveries.

I am, or was, hardcore. I used to fly for a virtual airline, shuttling endlessly in a Dash-8 between Toronto and Ottawa for Canadian VA, before I got bored, and got a transfer to Vancouver so at least the ground I was flying over wasn't completely flat. I've recreated flights I've taken to Dublin, Malaga and Zakynthos, in the same type of plane that was used. I've flown A380s from Heathrow to Toronto, Concordes from JFK to Heathrow, L1011s from Stansted to Montreal. I even started a round the world flight from Cardiff Bay, flying my favourite aircraft of all time, the Catalina, eastward, in realtime. With a cruise speed of 120kts, this took a VERY long time, though I must admit to doing university work during the long, long hauls. I leaned my fuel/air mixture to further increase my range (something I learned from my high school English teacher, who was very hardcore into Flight Sim and cited this one feature as his main reason for playing it). after hopping across the Med, I stopped in Israel, Dubai, India, Japan before finally reaching the plane's old home, Midway Island. That was about three years ago, and it hasn't moved on since.

When I was younger, I played the venerable Flight Assignment: ATP, widely regarded as the best airliner sim ever. Even younger, I used to play Solo Flight with my dad, which simulates perhaps the most obscure setting ever: delivering mail around 1930s USA from a little two-seater Ryan monoplane.

In terms of train sims, I've built an activity for MS Train Sim for the much neglected Tokyo-Hakone route, based on the real timetable. If I had a day off, I got up early so I can do the real timetable-based Marias Pass activities which involve driving heavy freight or passenger trains across the mountain pass. The most notorious of these, Pool Freight, was created by a real BNSF railwayman and takes about seven hours from start to finish of very intense driving.

Sadly, having a job and a missus and other responsibilities puts paid to these fanciful, wasteful days. It strikes me as no surprise that many hardened flight and train simmers are fat, middle-aged men who have retired early and now spend their days drinking ale, growing beards and neglecting their wives.

Which brings us nicely to the worrying. Otherwise known as Wrratt and friends. People have been building cockpits at home for years, but when you get to this stage you have to ask yourself whether it would be cheaper to just buy a real plane. Trainsimmers are also guilty of such madness.

Thing is, 'good boring' as described provides some enjoyable imagination and roleplaying. When I was younger, my parents had friends with two younger boys. We used to play Flight Sim on their computer, and the older brother and I would pretend it was a real flight and 'throw' the younger brother 'out of the plane' by pushing him out of the PC room and shutting the door - his genuine terror and protests were excellent. Likewise, playing a trucking game like Hard Truck or 18 Wheels of Steel, and pulling over to stop at a rest stop before going for a real life piss is amusing.

So, er, there you go. This too has turned into a bit of a ramble.

Surely it wasn't boring to you. If someone describes fishing or football to me it sounds boring but this doesn't mean that they actually, objectively are. To me being bored means that I'm wishing I was doing something else.

TRUFAX: I've never been able to find a copy of NGamer anywhere. Anywhere. Grr.

There is something insidious about dangling visible 'rewards' infront of people for repeating mundane and tedious tasks and then claiming that is the game. I haven't worked the argument out fully in my head yet but I think it's linked to the Pigeon Superstition experiment. We are being suckered into hammering a button for reward. Especially in MMO's.

I think you have to consider MMOs in a different light. Or at least I do. Not that I've played many of them. They're more about a social interaction than actually playing a game properly. They provide a basic framework of a world and game system for people to get together and have a good time. With some people it's an obsession to get to the highest level or whatever but for me it's always been more about how you play with other people. The MMORPG in particular benefits from those prepared to put something into the RPG element. If the game was more complex then you can't allow so much freedom for the personality to come through I'd expect.

Partially true. But you do have to conccentrate on playing well at a high level and in groups. Playing properly is essential in most raids and group play.

The interesting thing about MMOs - I was having an arguement elsewhere as Blizzard had just made certain shiney new armour easier for the more 'casual' player to get, and the hardcore raiders started moaning that it wasn't fair as it made light of all their 'hard work'. Like any sane person, I pointed out that when a game stops being fun and becomes 'hard work' you should maybe stop playing.

Thier counter was that it was akin to a team sport. You might not enjoy every minute of training - it's hard work, repetative and it leaves you exhausted, but it's worth it for the thrill of the competition and the eventual win, and the company is generally pretty good. This seems to be the MMO model - a lot of boring grinding (training) followed by moments of it all coming together and paying off (finally downing that boss).

Of course, society is set up to recognise and applaud those that are champion runners and such but really all it is moving your legs faster than other people. Though more worthwhile as you can make a career from it I guess.

Hmm, steering away from the MMO grinding aspect of this thread (as we've done it before), would you be interested in playing a game that made you depressed, upset or angry? Pathologic drained the author of the article I linked to . Would you find this interesting, or do you think games should be just made to be fun, slapstick comedy as it were?

I've downloaded Pathologic. I don't know if I'm going to play it yet, but I'm thinking about it.

I really wish Grandia was good boring. But it's not.

I want a Grandia anime. I'm half-way to figuring out cheatcodes that give me infinite experience and no random battles, so I can just watch the thing.

In answer to that question, I have played many hours of Forza 2.

On a slightly more serious basis, I can't think of a reason why you would want to do that. Watching or reading tragedies does not make me upset or angry. Even if those emotions fleetingly pass through me, it will invariably be replaced with admiration for someone's talent at being able to engender that emotion in me with a work of fiction (or if it is factual, that it has been presented well and/or that I have increased my knowledge).

People who are not mentalists (and even the less stable amongst us) do not tend to do things that will intentionally upset them, unless they get something out of it. Self-harm as release, etc.

I think that Pathologic game looks quite fun from the Wiki description.

Surely that's the same for every plot-lite game ever? Space invaders was exactly the same. The question is whether the process of button hammering is inherently intertaining.

Hells yes, in the same way that I'm happy to read books or watch films that make me depressed, upset or angry. Life would be very dull if we only watched, read and played things that made us laugh. You'd be less than a whole person, I think.

EDIT due to Curiosity's intervening post:



Really? You've never cried at something in a book or a film? Maybe I'm a bit of a girl, but I find I can be drawn into a story enough that I care about the characters sufficiently to get upset by their travails. Hells, Craster cried when one of the characters in one of the Dragonlance novels died. (Hi Craster!)



I completely and utterly disagree with this. We all do things that upset or scare us - watch horror films, for instance, or girls watching a "weepy" film or going on a rollercoaster, or bungee jumping or skydiving or whatever. I love getting scared. And as for getting upset, yes, people who aren't mentalists do this intentionally - not just with the aforementioned "weepies", but more everyday things, like listening to Hazel Blears on the radio and grinding your teeth with hatred and being upset to your very core by her existence. It does you good to be upset now and then.

Surely that depends whether it's the story making you d/u/a or the gameplay? If it makes you angry because it has monkey-retarted controls, that's undesirable. If it makes you angry because it has an evocative story line, that's great.

In fairness, I dopn't often cry when reading or watching something. It does happen occasionally (the first fiction reading material to make me cry was 'The Book Thief' by Markus Zusak... and the very next book I read, the factual 'Penguins Stopped Play' was the first factual book to do the same... maybe I was in a funny mood), but not all that often. I get VERY involved in books and TV shows and of course I get upset when a favourite character dies... but it doesn't leave me feeling actually depressed.



You seem to completely and utterly agree with me, at least in my head.

When watching a TV series like 'The Wire' or 24, I will get involved in the characters, and be upset when someone I like gets killed off, especially if done in a particularly poignant way. I am not, however, watching it with the intention of leaving in a bad mood and a feeling of regret that I ever watched it. I am watching it because it, overall, leaves me with a positive feeling.

For it to be genuinely negative, you would have to intentionally watch things that bore you senseless and have zero redeeming features.

Ditto with rollercoasters. They scare us, but only as an adjunct to getting a massive thrill, setting our pulses racing, firing up the adrenaline etc. The key part of what I said was:

...unless they get something out of it

I am scared of heights, but think going on the London Eye is fantastic, as it gives me a thrill as well as a wonderful vista. I am intentionally causing myself discomfort, but only because of a higher purpose, namely to enjoy myself.

If we are genuinely made upset/angry/whatever with no higher purpose of pleasure, then we stop doing what it was we were doing. That is precisely how we label things as bad games/films/books.

I meant the latter, obviously, you big cry baby.

Yep, I must learn to read properly. I thought you meant "unless they get something out of it, like people who self harm".

What REALLY twizzles my head, though, is when we are fooled into thinking we're getting something out of it, but really we aren't at all.

cf Gamerpoints.

In the article he mentions how films have moved on so much from slapstick. I'm not so sure that they even have, sure some of them tackle important issues but they are always made to be in some way entertaining. Schindler's List might be serious in intent but its director knew that it also needed a compelling narrative and moments of suspense and excitement. It's horrifying in parts but it isn't only horrifying. Films aren't ever going to tackle a serious topic in the same manner as a weighty book could because reading carries with it a different set of expectations, things work in books that don't in films. This isn't a bad thing.

I like to go skateboarding and fly model aeroplanes, neither of these things have ever made me cry and I've never admired a piece of music because it made me angry. That doesn't mean that I value these things less than films or books. I don't think that games should be expected to fulfil a role which isn't suited to the medium in some misguided attempt to be taken seriously. That's not to say that there isn't an awful long way to go and experiments like Pathologic are certainly interesting in defining what that role can be.

I was kind of talking about plot heavy games with this. But your right. RE4 or PoP: Sands of Time have plots that make you want to keep playing, but the mechanism of playing is also so enjoyable that it keeps you hammering away. They add to each other. Outrun 2006 and Space Invaders (Extreme) have no plots, but the button hammering is superb fun.

It's that insidious third type of game which isn't fun to play. But dangles future rewards to make you put up with it. Like how Lost works, by pretending it will all make sense one day.

Yes. I remember downloading and playing Burntime, and being utterly depressed by the utter hopelessness of the setting: you do, after all, roam the remnants of civilization scraping maggots out from under rocks for food, and the best eating you can ever hope for is dog meat.

It was perhaps the most depressing thing I'd seen or read until that marvellous post someone made on Bistro about the potentially thousands of worlds where the natives are doomed to hunter-gatherer existences amidst the ruins of their ancestors' great (21st-Century Earth equivalent) civilizations after they squandered all their unrenewable resources without advancing to better onces.

Likewise, Frontlines has sparked a pragmatic light within me that I am making plans to follow through: just in case it all does go wrong as the story tells us, I intend to be equipped with solar power and water purification and such to survive a partial or total collapse of society. And yes, I intend to be equipped to defend myself as well.

Upset and angry? Those are harder to evoke, I reckon. I've been touched and indeed upset by the stories of a few games (the original Klonoa among them) but I can't think of any games that have made me angry off the top of my head. I do know there have been one or two, though.*

*And to intercept those who know me making a joke 'oh, but Steve, you shout and swear while playing stuff all the time!', I mean by the actual subject matter or plot of said game.

Ah, I have that already... somewhere... hmm. Assuming I can find it out from wherever, I think I'm going to skip the articles completely for now, and go be mad in it. Let us both play it and not tell each other anything about it at all!

I started a similar thread on WoS (that typically I now can't find at all), with this game half in mind, having read a review of it on Eurogamer. The other game that I thought of immediately is STALKER. I've rhapsodized over that at length a couple of times before now; suffice it to say that the prospect of a stark and quirky FPS with bugs, oddities, and most of the language still in Russian, fills me with dark joy.

That unknowing, fearful, awed, first half an hour of the first game I had of STALKER is the absolute pinnacle of my gaming experiences to date, I would even say. The remaining hours I played it (before a hard drive crash) even managed to get close again, at times.

Would Frontier played in realtime be considered good-boring or bad-boring?

Given that entire weeks would elapse from your hyperspacing in to a system (especially Alpha Centauri) and actually reaching your destination spaceport, it depends entirely on where you went in-game and what activities you had aboard your 'ship' IRL. You could argue that all your real-life activities were just Stardreamer visions... but imagine how pissed you'd be if you went into a hostile or anarchy system and some twat in a Hawk airfighter manages the one-in-a-million ship to ship collision that kills you,

Oo, that reminds me;I still don't have Le Mans 24 Hr for the Dreamcast. I would try and do it, too. I'm so crazy.

This thread is a fascinating read. From this description of "good boring", it sounds a great deal like deep meditation. I had totally underestimated modern games, I must read more about this way of gameplaying.

Also, CUS, is the STALKER game you talk about based on the Tarkovsky film? That would be amazing if it was.

I would join you.

It's partly based on the film STALKER and the book that inspired the film, Roadside Picnic. It's a bit different from either though.

Excellently there are still the bolts to cheque for anomalies, and there are invisible/barely visible dangers to negotiate. There are lots of Stalkers all after artifacts - ordinary objects turned strange by the cataclysm. The cataclysm, instead of being the vague alien invasion (and one of the things I most deeply love about the film is the true terrifyingly vague incomprehensibility of that concept) is about Chernobyl having a second mysterious explosion of a type that has the same effect as the event in the film.

It has a lot of the atmosphere of the film and is a survival shooter, however it runs a bit too slow on my humble PC and is a bit too scary for me.

I really want to read Roadside Picnic. Are you a big fan of the Stalker movie, then? A friend of mine is a huge fan - and I like it lots too.

That's ace, I really wish I could get into games like this, but I really have no spare time to attempt it. I can imagine a post apocalypse game like the Stalker film being amazing. The film is great, also the original Solaris is great too.

WEC Le Mans was a fantastic game on the CPC. Horrendously under-rated, if I remember.

Pete said it well - it's based more on the movie Stalker than the Roadside Picnic novel, though (I'm about half-way through the latter, and thus far I do definitely recommend it). I have the DVD of Stalker, which I've been saving for a 'special occasion'. Might watch it tonight...

If I get bored enough this afternoon I'll re-type my pretentious 'first impressions' thing on Stalker again, Pupil, because it was ace, typically of my awesome self.

GazChap - no relation, sadly, but yeah, I had the Speccy version of WEC Le Mans and it was a rather ace little racer.

If you haven't seen it then I think you'll like it. It's a slow burner though, and not an easy watch. It's like Last of the Summer Wine but with the three duffers manically depressed and searching for the meaning of life in a wasteland of dilapidated industrial buildings and overgrown wilderness.

Hold on, that is Last of the Summerwine.

Also recommend: Russian Ark - I saw it at the cinema and its one of the most mind-blowing films ever, but possibly only if you see it on the big screen.

Anyone who thinks that the game conjures up even a fiftieth of the atmosphere of the film is a nutter. This includes both RuySan and CUS, both of whom are the wrongest people ever about STALKER.

It reminds me of DarkBASIC.

STALKER is a film throughout which you go "Whu?" and sit confused. And then a week later suddenly feel incredibly obsessed about and dream night after night and are compelled to watch it and rewatch it.

Also, watch the making of interviews. There's a very tragic and deeply sad story behind the making of STALKER, that puts 'OMG Brandon Lee!' etc sadly into the minor mishap category.

Aye - I've read the Wikipedia page on the film Stalker, and it really is a doomed affair. I'm quite certain I'll love the film, which is why I've been putting it off for so long - since about this time last year, in fact!

Irregardless of the game in comparison to its source material, it's hugely atmospheric and good and unlike anything else I've ever played.

Down-hill, in a bath on rollerskates?

Such out of control baths were a constant hazard for myself and my peers growing up in Holmfirth, we were always told at school to look both ways when crossing fields.

See - what did I say? Wrong.

Hold on, 'irregardless'?

*Aiee!*

(Hurls self out of window Billy Fan stylee)

Irregardlessly, I must depart from this topic.

Aaiee! Sorry. Myo, are you leaving because I said the evil word, or because we've had a page of Stalker dsicussion. Both are valid reasons I suppose, but you really should try Stalker.

I'd love to play STALKER, but I do not have a PC that would run it. Will a 360 release ever happen, do you think?

It's because you said the word, that's why.

A STALKER 360 release is supposed to happen this year sometime - hopefully including the 'Clear Sky' expansion/prequel that's coming out on the PC before then. However, given how long it took for the PC version of STALKER to come out, I wouldn't count on it.