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Finding New and Unintended Ways of Playing Games
Ronald Diemicke writes "World of Warcraft players sometimes hang out in front of Ironforge and dance. Fallout 3 players seek out new and elaborate ways of destroying their avatar. Brawlers in Smash Brothers have an itchy pause finger, ready to catch any humiliatingly hilarious screengrabs. The thugs running rampant in Grand Theft Auto are putting Evil Knievel to shame by using a full assortment of vehicles to pull off some incredible stunt work. Personally, I like to collect and move things. My favorite is making piles of bodies in any game that lets me move them around. Ever catch yourself doing something in-game that isn't exactly part of the game, or just something really dumb?"
instead of reading articles, it is more fun to be the first to comment on it without knowing what I am talking about
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
When I was introduced to (pre-WOW) Warcraft I would annihilate a level by _almost_ completing it. For example, if a requirement was that I needed three buildings to clear the level I'd only build two. Then I'd put the peons to work chopping down every tree, emptying every mine, sucking up every last bit of oil... Once there was nothing more that could be done to rape the landscape THEN I'd move on to the next level. Don't ask me why, it wasn't exactly fun sitting there waiting for them to finish. I just had the urge to take it ALL... I think I was meant to be an upper level executive instead of an admin. :P
I'm not sure if this really counts because often it fits in with the intent of the game, but I like to completely explore everything. Especially if there's a map that gets filled in as I explore; I will happily criss-cross a bare desert if it's the last uncharted corner of the map. It really clues you in on the quality of the game: the best games are the ones where the designers stuck all sorts of cool little things away in corners for people like me to find. The worst games are the ones where none of the doors open but the ones you need to reach the next story point.
ceci n'est pas une
I've used The Sims (1) to create some rather nice and pseudo-realistic drafts of some ideas my wife and I have for an expansion/remodel of our house. It worked quite well, despoite the limitations of this version of the game. Just create some random Sim, plop him on the property, pause the game, use the "rosebud;!;" cheat to rack up the Simoleans, and go to town.
I also used it to create sketches of a future radio station facility:
http://www.wphafm.org/concept
All done with The Sims (1)
I would like to try this with the Sims 2, seeing it provides much more flexibility and realism for such things. For now, though, those are my major "out-of-game" adventures. ;)
Willie...
Emergent behavior is a property of any complex enough non-linear system.
man, I must have spent a whole summer in halo 2 superbouncing and rocketlauncher-sword zooming (I forget what we called that) to see where I could get on maps. I hated it when people did that in ranked matches though.
I think we do these things because it's a new way to play a familiar game. Games get old and new games can be fun - especially when all your friends are already playing them - and you're tired of the "real" game.
Take a game like halo: standard shoot-em-up. Now you're practically free-running with superhero-like glitches flying you around the map juuuuust short of that one ledge. *runs around and tries it again*
It's just a matter of time before someone mentions machinima. Machinima is awesome. Most noteable is Red vs. Blue (another halo ref, I'm sorry) - a fan machinima that's been going for YEARS and even got it's most recent full-length film put into CANON. I couldn't believe that when I heard it. You know what, I just tried to get a citation and couldn't (going off of what my friend said). Who can confirm/deny that claim? I'd appreciate it.
Tricks and machinima. I think game developers (at least at Bethesda(spelling) and Rockstar games) are quickly realizing that sandboxy games are an easy way to let the gamers' imaginations add 100s of playing hours.
I always found it amusing to try to get straight female sims into lesbian relationships.
You could get them to be best of friends and then ...
Never worked, but it was fun trying.
...have absolutely nothing on the admins of it-he.org
Read their Ultima sections.
Reeeead them.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
This video was really popular around 6 years ago! Warthog jump
I also remember my college friends spending all their time shooting seagulls in Metal Gear Solid for the PS3.
and things that shouldn't be there! Sure, the regular easter eggs are fun, but it's more fun finding interesting ways to break a game or finding ways to end up somewhere that teaches you a bit more about how the game was constructed. TFA mentions suiciding in FO3. It sure is fun to shoot up a pile of cars and go flying (the best one is just west of the Arlington Library, on the freeway). The neat side effect of this is your corpse bouncing off the skybox. That's also the disappointing effect -- it limits how far you can fly.
I was particularly impressed when my brother called me over to show me how he figured out how to jump out of the train in Half-Life. My friends played that game for years and never found that little gem. Weirdness ensues when you leave the confines of the train and confound the scripts.
My best in-game friend letting me kill her over and over, then chop up her corpse(s) to supply me with body parts which were needed to take advantage of a bug that allowed you to place objects on the walls of a house.
It got to the point we were having to get creative to kill her as fast as possible. A pet White Wyrm turned out to be the best method. One Bite-Death. If he got hungry, I could feed him some of the body parts as well.
"Whoa! How'd you get all that stuff to hang on the wall?"
"You really want to know?"
The roping community from Worms: Armageddon and World Party abuse the ninja rope in ways the developers certainly never anticipated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQeNMD95lrE
...
/msg xOaPxJacky wiptistean
PACK: !Piles, AFR, CBA, KTC
gl+hf
A few weeks ago the gold farmers got a bunch of level-1 characters, all dressed alike, to lie down in a major city, then I guess got a high-level from the opposite faction to come in and kill them - so the bodies all spelled out a website URL. I wasn't there when it happened, just saw the results. I assume it happened on most of the other servers and for both factions, but I have no direct knowledge of that.
In WoW, a dead body sits around for quite a long time if the player doesn't resurrect. A level-80 mage or other character with an area-of-effect spell could most likely run in, avoiding combat until in range of the level-1's all lined up, then just fire a few quick blasts while running up the line and they all drop dead.
I tried to think of ways to move the bodies, there are a couple spells that can affect corpses, but I don't know if anyone tried to do it. Lying down or standing a large mount over them sort of messed it up, lighting fires or planting flowers really didn't do much. Eventually the bodies started disappearing as Blizzard cleaned it up. They did it again a few days later.
I actually finished SC and BW campaigns doing nothing other than zerglings for zergs, zealots for protoss and firebats for terran (marines are too powerful; so I decided to go for firebats). The entire game was quite easy even with this unit choice handicap. But when I arrived at the last mission of the expansion pack of BW. It was hell. The mission is as follow : You need to kill 3 overminds; each one with a special ability : 1- Your entire base is surrounded by invulnerable sunken colonies. The only way to reach that overmind is through a very long path of invulnerable sunken colonies. 2- Once ever 2-3 minutes a boss ultralisk would spawn and attack your base. That ultralisk takes only 1/2 HP damage per firebat hit, has 800HP and kills the firebat in a single hit. 3- Guardians and mutalisks attacks. Pretty hard to kill guardians with turrets since they have bigger ranger than turrets. I spent 8 hours in that single mission. I mined almost every last mineral of the map (some I couldn't reach because I could not build shuttles). t was absolutely awful, but I couldn't stop there. I HAD to be able to say I finished the entire game building nothing but the most basic units of the game.
I've never really realized how subconsciously evil I am until this topic was brought up. I'm usually a care-bear when it comes to online play, but when it comes to computers, I'm a total dick. For instance, in Spore I would pay all my allies to fight against each other in an effort to start a mindless massacre. In Oblivion, I would kill a whole town by using command humanoid to gather them, then casting a giant frenzy spell to start a mindless massacre (you can start to see the trend there). Then in other strategy games, I like to destroy everything except their main base. Then I build up a massive army of the strongest artillery, surround it, and then blast the bajesus out of it.
Help fight spam
I always liked playing coop Operation Flashpoint with friends, there was a particular map where the enemies had 2 or 3 tanks next to each other with the drivers standing next to them. The map was supposed to operate with you fighting the tanks with RPGs etc as the drivers would jump in as soon as you were detected, but we found that you could put everyone in a jeep, then drive full speed at the camp and if you were lucky you could run over the drivers before they got in the tank. Then everyone jumps in the tank, blows up the enemy tanks before they can turn the turret, and go on a rampage in a mission where you aren't supposed to have a tank. Soo much fun.
There was another mission where you could steal a helicopter in a similar way.
Sometimes it would take many tries to do it without someone being killed, but it was so worth it!
In Daggerfall I used to enjoy finding routes around town that minimised the time I spent on the ground. Why simply walk down the street when you can run along hedges or leap from rooftop to rooftop? Using magic would have been cheating of course.
WTF dude? Why did you 'HAVE' to do this? In another age, you would have been a bomber aircrew with a singleminded determination to esacpe a Nazi prison camp (the real kind, not the Wolfenstein 3D kind.) Or you would have been a crusader with the determination to wipe out all Christians from the Holy Land. Or you would have been a crewman on a British frigate, determined that Spain should not have hegemony of the seas. What happened to us, such that our best and brightest waste their talents on imaginary worlds instead of the real one?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Am I really the only one here who remembers Beyond Naked Mages? (sorry double post)
-Troll, Flamebait, and Offtopic are NOT equivalent to disagreement.
I finished Fallout 1 without a single kill. Turns out the developers had thought someone wanted to do that. There were experience rewards for sneaking or finding peaceful solutions in almost every quest. It is with that mindset that I started playing Fallout 3. I was disappointed...
When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?
A neat trick I used to do with the Apple II was to put two machines side by side on the same power bar, switch both machines on then flipping on the power bar, causing the machines to boot simultaneously. Next, I'd load up a Stock Trading game on both machines and start playing.
Why do this, you ask?
Well, the Apple II uses a very simple random number generator that is always the same sequence from the moment the system powers up. So, by booting two machines simultaneously, it put the random number generators on each system in sync with one another.
In terms of the Stock Trading game, this meant I could use one machine as a sort of crystal ball, allowing me to see into the game's future, and then use the generated results to only buy up stocks that were going to increase in value and sell off those that would decrease.
As long as the machines booted up simultaneously, this always worked.
8==8 Bones 8==8
So instead of single-mindedly killing fake people it's better if he single-mindedly killed real people? Perhaps not such a bad change after all, eh?
Not a sentence!
In Deus Ex, I occasionally rearranged the furniture in rooms for no particular reason. I can only imagine the reactions later: "Oh my god, my ammo and credit chits are all gone! And... someone has swapped my desk chair with the sofa from the break room. And my microscope is now on the corner table..."
I gave myself bonus points for the one time I did it while a guard was patrolling the room. I wonder if there's some sort of term for this in psychology.
I also have a riot occasionally setting up Team Fortress 2 engineer-buildings in ridiculous places, such as completely submerged in a lake.
And don't even get me started on Dwarf Fortress. How long do you want to bet a dwarven settlement, constructed entirely of soap, can survive on a diet consisting solely of horse meat and beer?
There's a Starcraft mission where you, playing Terran, get overrun by the Zerg right after you kill off the Protoss. I left one Protoss building standing until I was ready for the Zerg. "Ready" meant that I'd poured all remaining resources into planting siege tanks, bunkers of marines and a few turrets in the area where the Zerg usually attack. I finally knocked over the last Protoss building to win the mission. The story animation -- explaining that Kerrigan was being left at the mercy of the Zerg army -- lasted longer than the Zerg army did. If you didn't do something similar, you haven't played the game properly.
GTA3 had a cheat to make all pedestrians hate (and attack) you wherever possible. It made playing through the game much more of a challenge. There was another cheat to give the pedestrians weapons (including rocket launchers), which made it a bit too difficult for some missions.
And in all GTAs, it was possible to do a substantial number of the boring side-missions before the main story. Getting that 100th hidden package in GTA3 involved some tricky flying, but it had to be done. I still regret that there were 4 unique jumps in Vice City that I couldn't get at the start of the game.
In the Thief games, I liked to stack bodies (of course). I also liked to blackjack every human / kill every monster in an area, and then run around waving my sword for maximum visibility, setting off all the alarms.
Now I feel like I've shared too much.
My nephew, age almost 4, had figured out the sequence of commands to start Sim City, enter the security code, and load a city. (he couldn't read, but he had excellent symbol-matching skills)
He had no strategy, he just bulldozed things until he ran out of money, then started a new game at random. I think he's working on managing Boston's Big Dig project now.
I think everyone does the "go backwards in a race" from time to time.
I'd really like to see this happen in Formula1.
A friend's son was a huge fan of building a large park with no exits and some cool attractions. Once the park was filled, and the customers had no way to exit, he would turn a tiger loose in the park. The carnage was fun to watch. Bodies would be flying through the air after being shaken silly by the tiger, people would be screaming.... I was amazed that they'd built such things into the game.
I believe the title was Amusement Park Tycoon.
When the author praised halo as a landmark game because it gave the player regenerating health. Thats dumbing down a game not making it better, part of the fun of fps's when i used to play them regularly was trying to stay alive and avoid getting hurt. frankly i wonder when retail mainstream games will reach a point where they dumb them down enough that all you have to do is hit a little button on the menu screen to beat the game..
What happened to part of the fun of playing the game being the effort and skill needed to play it?
In Hitman: Blood Money, on the third or fourth map where you had to infiltrate that mobsters house? Well, one day I just decided to do things a little differently. I went up to the clown guy, clubbed him and took his outfit. Then I stuffed him in his car, planning on coming back to him later. No one saw me, so things were cool. Then enacted my nefarious plan. It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood...
I walked up to the garbage man. He was just going about his business, with no appreciation for the wonderful gift he had in his possession - the garbage truck, a.k.a. Da Macheen. Da Macheen was mine, would be mine, and I had only one thing standing in my way. I clubbed the garbage man, while in full clown suit, because that's how wanton murder in broad daylight is done, and proceeded to feed Da Macheen his first meal of the day. CRRRUUUNCH. So satisfying. But Da Macheen needed more.
I look across the street, where a woman was tending her lawn. Da Macheen... I wander over, and before long, I had another tribute to Da Macheen. "The Street. Everyone! Feed me EVERYONE!" said Da Macheen. I adjusted my clown nose and position my firey red wig. "It shall be done!" This day, Hell had come to Baker Street...
I never got the rhythm of ball jumping in classic Metroid. I used the NES Advantage, flipped on the Turbo for the B button and then turned the knob until it got to the exact right frequency. I could climb all the way to the top of the screen that way (which is good since there was that energy tank on the ceiling in that one place).
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
Just wanted to thank everyone for posting their thoughts and sharing their own in-game antics as we had asked you to on SleeperHit. I'm not exactly surprised that I'm familiar with some of these antics, just much more surprised at how many more the community had created that I'll have to try out now. Again, I didn't expect many people to read either my article or Ron's rebuttal to it but I was still looking forward to hearing some of your thoughts. Rob and Ron look forward to disagreeing with each other in the future and we'd love to hear what you think and what stance you'll take then as well. Whether it's with us at SleeperHit or here if we get slashdotted again. Thanks for contributing. I'll be playing tag or catch with myself in Portal. -Rob
I play a version of Freecell, with the same rules but a different goal. But you need to turn off autodrop, so you can't play it in Microsoft Freecell. Pysol works well.
The new goal is to get all the cards in four long streams, king down to whatever, with as few cards as possible in the output stacks. Your score is negative - the best you can do is nothing at all in the output stacks which gives you a score of zero. An Ace counts one, two counts two, three counts three, etc. If the output stack contains an ace and two of every suit that's a twelve; not bad. I can usually get below ten, which is better.
It requires you to generate long streams of cards and be creative in moving them around. You have to decide the tradeoffs - can you get the stream from here to there or do you have to put an ace in the output stacks, costing you a point? And remmember that if you put the ace and two of spades in the output stack you'll be short a black two when you want to stream up the last red ace, so you'll have to put the red ace on the output stack also and your score will be four, not three.
It's a challenge; requires a lot more look-ahead than most versions of Solitaire.