On Extraneous Information in Games

Today I was correlating a list of the thaumaturgical rituals in Exalted for a possible game (about which more later), and when I was flipping through all the books and looking for every ritual I could find, I saw this one:

First Greeting (1, Perception, 1, five minutes): This simple ritual is practiced in countless Threshold communities to name newborns. It must be performed within one day of an infant's birth. Beseeching the Maidens for their wisdom, the thaumaturge intently examines a newborn child, attempting to discern the name that would most fit the plans destiny has laid out for it. While it is debatable whether Heaven cares what any individual mortal is called, success on the ritual‟s activation roll grants the practitioner a flash of insight and a name. If that name is granted to the infant, the child enjoys a +1 bonus on all Resistance rolls for its first year of life.

On the one hand, that's fantastic. Assuming your generic child has Stamina 1 and no Resistance, then a five-minute ritual of prayer doubles their resilience against disease or other calamities. Even counting rampaging gods or man-eating dinosaurs, that means that the infant mortality rate in Creation is probably a lot lower than it was in pre-industrial Earth, which explains why the population can be approaching one billion even though the technology in most places is still bronze or iron level.

On the other hand, no PC would ever take that, especially if they're Exalted. Even in a God-Blooded or mortals game where one of the PCs is a village healer or wise woman... Well, I guess they might take it for backstory--I've spent XP on abilities or skills that I knew I wouldn't use because it was reasonable that I would possess them because of my character's previous history--but otherwise, even at only 1 XP, it'll probably never be bought. It's just a hunch, but I expect that the number of GMs who called for Stamina + Resistance rolls from the children in the characters' village to resist Bonebreak Fever is as close to zero as makes no odds.

I'm still glad it's there, though. Even if it isn't ever going to be bought by a character, its existence implies that NPCs have it and use it, and helps explain how the world works.

As another example, take Mass Effect (1, because that's the only one I played). As you're traveling around the galaxy, one of the sidequests you can do is scan planets for usable resources and survey them, and then send the data back to Earth for later use. Some of the planets let you land on them and roam around in a tank looking for minerals, but a lot of them you just scan them and check spectrographically for minerals or valuable gasses and then leave. The thing is, all the planets have an entry in the codex, even if it's just a paragraph. There's even a summary of planetary conditions for each planet, with entries like atmospheric pressure, orbital period, orbital distance, surface temperature, and so on. Here's an example:

An enigmatic terrestrial planet, Zayarter has a hazy atmosphere of nitrogen and argon. The surface is scorching hot, and mainly composed of calcium with deposits of sodium. Three times in the last century, ships stopping to discharge at Treyarmus reported geometric patterns of lights on the dark side of Zayarter. Attempts at further investigation proved fruitless; the lights disappear when ships approach the inner system.

Pretty much useless in the scheme of the game, since you can't land on the planet and certainly can't investigate the lights. There was no need to write blurbs like that for most of the planets, and surveying would have worked just as well without them, because that's how it worked in Star Control II. But having them makes the world feel more real.

There's also the fact that occasionally as you're surveying planets, you find ruins, or a layer of glass several meters down over the entire habitable surface of the planet, or overlapping rings indicative or massive asteroid bombardment. Here's one:

Helyme is thought to be the homeworld of the arthenn, a spacefaring species that disappeared approximately 300,000 years ago. Precisely what happened to Helyme is still under debate. It appears a global extinction occurred, wiping out all native animal life forms more complex than zooplankton. Plant forms were not affected, but the lack of oxygen-breathing life caused oxygenation of the atmosphere. Plant life was reduced after lighting storms ignited global wildfires.

Like Helyme, the examples always occur in multiples of 50,000 years, but it's probably just a coincidence.

How do you feel about content like this? Is it wasted space that should have been spent on rituals that the PCs would be likely to take, or more development time that should have been devoted to making the Mako sections more interesting? Poll included!:
[Poll #1945980]

My icon is misspelled

My default icon, a quote from Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu, has a misspelling. If you look closely, you'll notice it says "older then brooding..." rather than the correct "older than brooding..."

I find this incredibly distressing, and I didn't make the icon so I can't easily fix it. Maybe I should try anyway.

Edit: Haha! I fixed it! If you're curious now what I had to fix, the original is here.

Game Review: Limbo

Yeah, I'm mostly late to the party when it comes to video gaming.

I just beat Limbo literally seconds ago, after playing it over the last two days. As people told me, it's not that long at all--my time played on Steam is three hours, and that includes some time I had it alt-tabbed while I was doing something else at the time. The actual time necessary to beat the game is maybe 2/3rds of that, since I spent a lot of time dead, dying, or respawning.

That's my major complaint about the game--it is entirely based on trial and error. The developers even call it a "trial and death" game, which as good a capsule summary as I've ever seen. Typically there's no warning at all for when your next horrific death will occur, and you have to run over unstable ground and pull unknown switches and jump into pits without knowing what's below in the knowledge that at least Limbo has an extensive checkpoint system and you'll never be further back than one puzzle. Despite being occasionally annoyed with the next sudden death out of nowhere, there was only one section that I was annoyed at the place where I respawned, and it was just because there was a particular puzzle I didn't like.


I guess in that aspect, it's a lot like Super Meat Boy. The levels in Limbo are longer, but the distance between each individual checkpoint is about the same as the distance covered in a single Super Meat Boy level. On the other hand, Super Meat Boy demands a lot more on-point precision than Limbo does. The number of puzzles where you have to get everything right to the fraction of a second is very low and all of them are concentrated in the second half of the game. Usually, the pace is pretty leisurely, and I was lulled into a false sense of what the game was actually going to be about while I wandered through a shadowed forest until I stepped on a bear trap and my poor pre-teen shadow boy was mutilated to death. That clued me in to how the game worked real quick.

Speaking of the forest, Limbo is gorgeous:


That's one of my pictures. The one a couple paragraphs above is from the Internet, and if you like those a Google search will turn up plenty more. The entire game is cast in light and shadow, with most of the background in soft focus, leading to a kind of odd dreamlike feel. Which is just as well, because when you think too hard about it, you realize that you're getting a pre-teen shadow boy killed in dozens of hideous ways over the course of the game. The name of the game kind of implies the plot--your character died, and woke up in Limbo and now has to get out, or at least get somewhere else--but there's no dialogue and nothing is ever explained. There are a few hints that one can discover through the other characters in the game, if they can be called characters when they show up briefly and never say anything, and the setting. The first half is a forest, there's a brief primitive village in the middle, and the second half is more of an industrial/factory setting with spinning gears and levers and electricity.

I liked the first half a lot more than the second half. I think the art style complimented the forest setting a lot more than the factory, since soft focus and hazy background details fit better when you're surrounded by trees that are filtering out some of the light than when you see neon signs or unknown structures in the distance. The first half, with the pools and half-abandoned villages and shadowy figures barely seen and the giant spider, is far more sinister to me than the lonely factory. Even though I know it's all metaphorical, I still run into the same problem I run into with dungeons in RPGs, where I wonder who built this thing and why it's full of so many traps that anyone who actually lived there would die half a dozen times on the way to the bathroom in the morning. The main reason I didn't like the factory as much is just the loneliness, though. Shadowy half-seen figures are more interesting than spinning blades and falling crates. It wasn't enough to actively made the game bad, because the basic gameplay doesn't change. You're just dodging electric floors instead of thrown spears.

If the trial-and-error gameplay doesn't bother you, Limbo is a great puzzle platformer. Definitely recommended.