On Thief’s Narrative in Level Design

“The Ancient Corruption was again contained. To do more would have upset the balance, but we knew to remain ever vigilant lest it resurface. Neither the Hammers nor the Pagans could be trusted not to meddle.”

So, welcome back and let’s get on to storytelling! The narrative in Thief is delivered also at the players control most of the time. The writing of the world building is stellar and much of it you experience on your own volition. Even though the game has a linear story from one mission to the next with cutscenes and briefing before the levels, within the level design is a rich tapestry of eavesdropping opportunities, notes and letters to read and the environmental storytelling acting as a window into the psyche of the inhabitants or designers of the various mansions, streets and castles you’ll be sneaking through.

Narrative in Assassins

Thief doesn’t have an open world structure in the way we’d expect from a game like it these days. They worked around this constraint by coming up with their own level design conventions and expectations. Starting with the very first mission in Thief, there’s always a safe outside area to the mission and then there is the actual interior area of the mission, the objective of your mission that you must infiltrate and loot. The outside is usually an open space, outskirt of the town, an abandoned graveyard, a public space possibly where you can roam around outside the mansion walls with little danger and worry from the guards or civilians. The first thing you often figure out is how to actually break into the mission proper.

By the fifth mission of Thief you are rather familiar with this design pattern. And that’s when the developers throw you a curve ball. In Assassins, your briefing for the mission tells you how you’ve acquired a set of lock picks and Garret deliberates testing them out by infiltrating a local Hammerite temple for some quick loot… except within the first few seconds into the mission, your supplier gets shot by a pair of thugs sent to assassinate you. On the fly your objectives change to tail undetected your would-be assassins through the twisting maze-like streets of The City to their employer who sent them after you. It’s the first time the designers mislead your expectations for the mission with the objectives list and briefing.

This mission is the first time you are expected to tail a target and the level plays a lot with interesting ways to challenge the player and their observation skills and patience. If you follow them too closely or noisily or fumble on some metal grating, the assassins hear you and stop. If they become alerted, you will fail the mission. Occasionally they get suspicious and stop and turn around to see if they’re being followed. If they see you, you will fail the mission. If you trail too far behind them, you will fail the mission. There is no feedback or a meter or a gauge to rely on to know when you are trailing off too far, the tendency for the player is to err on staying closer than falling back too much. The tension rises as you’re navigating mere steps behind them and find yourself exposed often as you’re trying to follow them whilst keeping yourself tucked away in the shadows and behind cover.

This mission is also the first time you experience The City in such an expansive sense. A vast labyrinth of narrow medieval streets and alleys without a grid pattern or signage. Most of the light sources you have to deal with are inextinguishable, closed off lanterns, electric street lights or light flooding into the streets from the buildings. You have to carefully plan your movements to keep up pace with the thugs. All this combined with the scarcity of familiar landmarks means that the designers use this part to mess with your head. For example, if you try to rely on following the footsteps of the assassin alone you’ll be thrown off when you get to some street corners and an innocent bystander is having a merry little walk down the other street.

Near the end of the chase, your targets walk through an archway and up a ramp, and turn the corner. The rounded towers offer a wide field of view so you can see an inviting patch of darkness under the arch. But this seemingly safe patch of darkness under the archway is misleading. Your light indicator will glow yellow, which means from a short distance away an enemy can get suspicious and approach the player, if they turn around. You can’t get much closer through, because the bright street lamp is inextinguishable. To minimize their exposure as much as possible, most players will crouch to hide. The player has limited options, based on available information.

• Hang back and risk losing your targets.
• Extinguish the torch with a water arrow and rush up to the top for cover. But we don’t know the floor surface at the top because the incline and the sudden torch extinguishing might make the assassins suspicious.
• Move to the left and try and mantle over the brick embankment.

The designers throw you a bone, you don’t have to see a floor surface to know what’s there, if you’ll listen to the assassins’ footsteps. After the assassins get to the top of the ramp and turn that corner and you hear the tell-tale clang of boots on metal, you freeze midway up that stone ramp and listen for how many metal steps you hear. A lot of metal steps means a long metal catwalk. That’s the beauty of a footstep mechanic: it translates sound into space and surface.

But you only hear a couple metal steps, and if it’s only a couple then you can easily move silently over them by creeping slowly. The design of the ramp actually emphasizes the metal strip by putting three different floor materials together in this sequence, which is somewhat rare in Thief levels. They want you to notice the metal and the changes in the footsteps. Armed with this knowledge you may risk to follow them a bit closer.
As you move up from the left, the assassins have stopped and are probably watching for you on the ramp on the right. The two pipes in the middle exist only to block your line of sight as you look to your left and cause some mild panic. The designers knew what you were going to do and stacked two different kinds of blind corners next to each other.
And that’s just the stuff going on in one short segment in the first act of this mission. It illustrates Thief’s depth of design, it imbues basic 3D perspective rules with drama and absolutely soaks environments in tension. It also demonstrates problems with having a third person camera in a stealth game. All that built up tension about incomplete information never develops in this way when you can move the care and peek over and around. Third person camera empowers the player with better awareness but kills all the possibility for this level of tension.

By the end of the city streets section, you find the assassins’ hideout. A castle owned by a nefarious character named Ramirez who ordered your hit. You’re tasked with getting back at him in the only way you know how: robbing him blind. It’s rather unexpected. You feel like the mission should be over now with the objective completed, but instead it feels like two missions in one.

The Ramirez mansion is much easier to figure out than the streets. There are only a handful of guards patrolling the top floor, you’ll have control over the entire area very quickly. In contrast to the really thoughtful city streets from earlier, this interior of the mansion is simple and comprehensible, the main corridors are narrow and arranged somewhat symmetrically, and many of the floors are made of relatively muted stone that aids in the sneakin.

When comparing the first mission Lord Bafford’s mansion and Ramirez’s mansion some differences are noteworthy.

• Bafford’s place is much bigger and elaborate than Ramirez’s place.
• Bafford has a throne room and separate wings with lots of art everywhere. Ramirez has a simple, compact villa plan with central courtyard; the walls are textured plainly; he has also installed hidden wall-slits to spy on guests in their bedrooms.
• Bafford’s basement is old. Ramirez has recently renovated his basement with an illegal animal pen and his office and treasury.
• Bafford’s rare treasure is a royal scepter, and there’s a guard with a gong outside. Ramirez has a silver firepoker, and some sort of electric alarm system wired throughout the house.
• The difference in alarms is telling, and both treasures are deeply personal, phallic objects that connote power, but the context where you find the firepoker is more insidious, especially when considering the “peepshow” wall-slits into the guest bedrooms.
• Lastly, a letter you find within the mansion finishes the comparison. The letter is Bafford’s apology for being late on payments to Ramirez, which means he’s lower on the hierarchy than Ramirez even though his place is bigger and fancier. In this way, Looking Glass uses reading text to compliment reading architecture. The differences in level design are forms of characterization: the banners of both these lords make these spaces private and personal. The size and opulence in decoration implies Bafford is obsessed with just the image of power; meanwhile, the comparatively Spartan Ramirez prefers the power of power. When you’re infiltrating these castles, you’re actually sneaking into their heads and learning their secrets and insecurities through their personal spaces. The home is a metaphor for it’s owner.

Given your skill level at this point in the game, looting the mansion is so easy that you’ll most likely never trip the alarm. And if you never trip the alarm, the game never triggers the final optional stage of the mission. Ramirez sends his guards out into the streets and you have to make it back to your neighborhood in a desperate escape.

The exit portion of each level in Thief is usually pretty trivial as you backtrack through an already familiar level, possibly past the unconscious or dead bodies of the many guards you left in your wake. But in this level the game spawns overwhelming number of thugs to hunt you down. They’re all permanently alerted and they’re all actively looking for you. It’s an unexpected change in stakes and world state. All those blind corners suddenly function very differently when you’re approaching them from the other way. The city streets are familiar and alien at the same time. The start of the level that you had just mastered has now been inverted and re-introduced as a dangerous territory.

The City starts out as a neutral space, becomes a victim as it’s altered by Ramirez’ private space that you infiltrate and by the time you leave The City has become your familiar enemy. A full character arc for the level in a relatively short and easy mission, Assassin is one of the most satisfying and dynamically changing missions in the game.

Immersiveness and believability of the maze-like gameworld is built into the very DNA of the game. If there is any one thing to take from the accomplishments of Thief it is the ingenuity of the levels. Almost every major game released in the past 6 years or more has had a minimap system and objective markers in them. The industry is blindly rushing forward and accepting that always on minimap and clearly marked objectives are an improvement, when the absence of them can just as well be a conscious choice in design and an important feature. I personally have lately been getting tired of being led through games by the nose and would appreciate the opportunity to slow down again and take in the world and maybe even forget that I’m ticking off boxes for chores in a to-do list and just playing a game, having an experience that only the video game medium can provide.

j.

On Thief’s Design Ideology

“I am a Wallbuilder. Let my walls endure, from season to season, year to year, and age to age. Let my walls stand, while families toil, armies march, and empires fall. I am a Wallbuilder, and my walls will stand always as a shield against evil. This I pray, that will the Master Builder grant.”

Final Task

Your final task for this course is to choose a “Media Channels & Platforms” related subject (something we have covered to any extent during the course, or which is otherwise related) and construct your own written or practical media project which explores a theme or asks a certain question.

Thief, or What’s Yours is Mine

Thief: The Dark Project was released by Looking Glass Studios in 1998, eighteen years ago. 1998 is considered by many to be one of the finest years in gaming, the number of groundbreaking releases is one thing but the effect they had on what followed is unquestionable. Metal Gear Solid, Pokemon Red & Blue, Baldur’s Gate,  StarCraft & Broodwar, Grim Fandango, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Fallout 2, Resident Evil 2, Tekken 3, Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus, Unreal, Half Life… The list is staggering. 3D-gaming was going places, the first person view games saw the birth of Unreal Engine in Unreal, Source peaked it’s head in Valve‘s Half Life as Goldsource engine. But while both Unreal and Half Life promised to deliver something unforeseen, it was Thief: The Dark Project that actually delivered.

Thief, along and Metal Gear Solid and Tenchu: Stealth Assassins all can be considered to be the progenitors of the modern stealth game genre. Stealth mechanics in games and even stealth focused games of course existed before, notably Metal Gear on the MSX in 1987 and Castle Wolfenstein back in 1981, but it wasn’t really as strongly established as a genre in itself until 1998.

Thief is a free-form stealth game with emphasis on evasion and misdirection rather than direct aggression, featuring a bold and distinctive cohesive visual style that holds up even today even if the engine doesn’t. It is set in a subtle and nuanced world of The City, a sprawling city resembling late medieval London. Steampunk mechanics and fantastical magics are present and perpetually at war with each other in this medieval world and represented by the extremes of the order of Hammerites worshiping the Builder and the more chaotic order of Pagans who worship the Trickster, a demonic spirit of nature. Garret, the protagonist of the series, finds himself involved in the fight between these two factions even though he is a brooding loner who wants to take no part in the affairs of the rest of The City.

The visual design is quite stylized. This reliance on style holds up well in comparison to games these days that may be better looking but the art direction is often rather stale, tired and what I feel is creatively bankrupt. From a technical standpoint, Thief is horribly dated and there’s not much you can do about that to sugarcoat it. But yet I still find myself incredibly immersed in the game whenever I boot up the old workhorse.

Thief is a testament to how removal of elements can be just as meaningful as adding them. In the industry where the modern games are becoming more linear and cinematic experiences, the classic Thief series still stands strong as an example of the power of the player agency, interactivity and worldbuilding. In modern game design we understand that stealth is for the quick and the nimble. In games such as Mark of the Ninja or Dishonored movement is a privilege that the separates you from the guards and the enemies. You’ll be teleporting and climbing, crawling along the ceiling and in shafts and vents where the guards have no way of reaching. In Thief, movement is a loud, clunky and reckless. Some of that is because of the way the game handles movement physics; Garret has a real heft and momentum and he’ll slide and push and bump into things. In Thief any sort of movement has the player committing to it, jumping, running, even mantling onto and over things generates noise, raises your visibility, attracts the attention of the guards in ways that is typically far more forgiving in other games. Speed and movement are not seen as an ability of the stealthy but rather as the mistakes of impatience. It isn’t the nimble who are invisible but those who know when not to move at all.

Compass will quickly become a trusted friend in Thief: The Dark Project

Speaking of the stealth system, it is rather unique even to this day. Looking Glass Studios really tried hard to simulate detectability more than any other system of subterfuge. While most other games focus on systems like line of sight, camouflage, or disguise, Thief tries hard to systemise what it means to be visible and unheard. Movement speed, large objects you are holding, the type of surface you’re walking on, the degree of light you are standing in, and whether you are out in the open or pressed against a surface all have an impact on your detectability. The combat in Thief also plays a role in the stealth focused design. It is intentionally clunky and messy, the frustration of the dangerous combat and loud noises make you feel that you have made a mistake. Yet the game doesn’t explicitly punish you for killing except in the highest Expert difficulty. The actual punishment is something internalized, you’ll feel like a sloppy amateur when you’ve let the situation get so out of hand that you’re resorting to the sword. The game is not anti-violent but rather a game that finds non-violent play more challenging and a sign of more skilled play.

You done goofed

Thief uses ingenious way of world building with diagetically appropriate map system that is not really seen in other games. The maps you’ll rely on are sparse with their level of information, often being little more than rough sketches Garret seems to have drawn himself or acquired from begrudged servants or other informants. In the pre-mission briefings Garret often ruminates on how he came to have this map or possess the information he used to construct the map himself. When Garret is scrounging about in old abandoned tombs, his map only has a vague idea of where the family tombs he’s come to rob might be located. Besides a few well mapped out levels especially in the early game, the map often acts only as a general guide in most of the levels and you have to engage on a far more meaningful way with the game world. You’ll be taking in details and noticing possible points of interest because you have to or else you’ll be lost.

Another good example is how in the mission where you’ll be visiting a haunted cathedral in the old town quarter the map is well made and would be quite accurate on the street level. But due to the years of decay and collapse, some of the expected pathways and roads that you can see on the map are closed off.

The Sword — The sixth mission has Garret breaking into mansion with no information on the layout of the place

Thief forces the player to do thinking and use the map as one would in real life. You look for landmarks and navigate on from there, it rewards your attention and the exploration. So you are often rewarded but not in the way that developers these days award you for exploration out of sort of obligation. You’ll probably know what I’m talking about. You might go and look under the staircase you just came down or take peek off the beaten path into a dark alleyway and you’ll surely find some money, ammo, or any other appropriate pickup. Hooray.

This is an on the nose reward and you can feel the developer giving you a pat on the head for being an inquisitive player. But does it even make sense in the context of the narrative of the game? Why would the Nazi soldiers in Wolfenstein stash boxes of ammunition and money under the stairs? What is all that gold loot doing in the kitchen cupboards? Grenades in the larder?

In Thief the Dark Project, whenever the game rewards you for exploration it does so while sticking to the rules of the design. In the servants quarters you won’t be finding so much in the way of money or jewels, but you might come upon a letter detailing where the cook has been stashing away the valuable vintage wines. This makes believable sense and you’ll keep an eye out for this loot. The armoury might have a stash of arrows and only the lord of the manor would have silver candlesticks and jewellery lying about. In most modern games, the levels are built into predictable tunnel on purpose, giving  the developers are lot of opportunities to focus on strong pacing and good gameplay. It is easy to predict and guide the player along and have them experience the game in any desired way. This leads the level feeling ultimately very gamey, the number of enemies and resources will be designed according to pacing. In Thief series the levels are built with real world architechture in mind, rooms and entrances are where they make the most sense and the world is populated with objects and opponents where you’d expect them to be.

Down In The Bonehoard — The fourth mission teaches you how unreliable maps can be

Thief, like other Looking Glass Studios games, have always had a very high level of interactivity with the objects and levels in the game. Torches can be lit, put out, objects can be picked up and thrown about. Looking Glass Studios has an incredibly strong pedigree and had an influence on the whole video game industry from early on. When LGS was demoing their work on a first person game that came to be Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss in Consumer Electronics Show in 1991 it caught the eye of a young developer by the name of John Carmack who felt he could write a code for faster texture mapping than what Ultima Underworld had and made Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Ultima Underworld featured a number of innovations seen for the first time ever in a first person game. Like non-grid based movement, sloped surfaces, looking up and down(wow!), jumping, swimming, light system, 3d objects, context sensitive music, sprawling and complex levels necessitating a 3D map. Ultima Underworld came 2 months before Wolfenstein 3d and two years before Doom, and was probably the first non-flight simulator game to feature this level of immersiveness in a video game environment.

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss — not a dungeon crawler, but a dungeon simulation

Another case where what seems to be design flaws is actually intentional design choices; in Thief you’ll be picking up a great number of keys as you go on in some of the more complex levels, choosing the right key for the right door is a process that is automated in most modern games but in Thief you will have to manually go through the keys in your inventory. This is not a question of dated mechanics being compared to modern conventions of convenience, it is a choice by design. Knowing which key to use or hurriedly shuffling through your keyring as you hear the approaching footsteps of the guard is part of the experience and it builds up the tension, will you get the right key in time or should you risk it and run, avoid being seen but alert the guard with your noise, all valid choices and ones that you would not even be presented with if the choice was correct and automated constantly. One of the hallmarks of Looking Glass Studios is this understanding that context sensitive actions, quick-time events and other similar actions break the consistency of the game world and player immersion. Context sensitive actions are especially a modern game design contrivance that I feel quite strongly against. The phrase “When you press a button, something awesome has to happen” has been part of the dogma of modern design, the player’s role is there to witness the action as a passive voyeur, while the Looking Glass Studios always tried to emphasize player action and interaction with the game world. This chasm between the design ideologies is perfectly captured in the comparison of the original Thief games and the modern reboot from 2014. In the classic Thief games you can explore hard to reach places using special equipment like rope arrows. The developers always allow you to shoot these arrows wherever you wish but limit you with plausible restrictions. The developer might not want you to get to some places so there’ll be obstruction or the ceiling might be made of stone or metal. In some cases, the ceiling might be so high up that the rope simply does not reach down far enough. It is always a plausible reason within the game world whilst also limiting you by design. In the 2014 Thief, the brilliant and innovative way the developers came up with to limit your exploration is by only allowing you to fire a rope arrow in very specific context sensitive locations where you’ll automatically walk up to a prompt and hold down a button to shoot a rope arrow to a predetermined spot in the level. Why even include *this* level of interaction? It is maddening.

Further comparison of the modern 2014 Thief and the original Thief illustrates the big differences in design ideologies really well. Thief 2014 has a minimap that is on by default and laser accurate quest markers for objectives that lead you along like a trail of crumbs.
Whenever you have a quest marker and a minimap in a videogame, in effect you’ll be putting blinders on the player. You stop taking in the gameworld in a meaningful way because you’ll be so objective driven to carry on a straight beeline towards the next immediate reward. You’re not so much playing the game immersively than you are following a laundrylist of instructions: go here, pick up this, move here, talk to this person, pick up this item.

In Thief you’ll stumble upon things, explore, learn and you’ll know and respect the level and challenge that you just overcame. Quest markers are one of the laziest game design elements that I can think of. A common response to this criticism is to advice the player to just turn them off if you’re so bothered by this. This only magnifies the problem, if the game and the levels have been designed with the quest markers and objectives on, it’ll mean that nobody’s given thought to how one would navigate the level without the benefit of these markers. You’ll just be completely lost.

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While other contemporary first person games like Half Life and Unreal relied very heavily on scripting and being engine showcases that took you from one set piece to the next, Thief is a very player driven experience, while it is mission based like Terra Nova the level design is more similar to underworld or system shock, you’re dropped into huge living levels with a rough map and some mission objectives, from there on out it is up to the player to navigate the level and decide which route to take. You’re forced to pay attention to your surroundings, read the maps and notes and think for yourself. That is one of the reasons why the game is so memorable when compared to many modern games, the game does not hold your hand and you have to work in order to make progress. But the overall gameplay experience is a lot more satisfying because of that. You’re not in a vegetative state following orders mindlessly, Thief is often called a thinking man’s shooter. The level design was aimed at realism rather than gameplay convenience which makes getting lost easy but it also means you can access most areas from more than one place.

In my follow-up post I will discuss the way storytelling in Thief is weaved into the level design. Toodles!

j. 

(TO BE CONTINUED)

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1bQ1tCulZppwyVFB0zqItll194fnDP7ubVk65Ej1M7k8/edit?usp=sharing

 

On Rise of the Tomb Raider

“There are no heroes here. Only survivors.”

Crystal Dynamics followed their Tomb Raider reboot from 2013 with a sequel earlier this year. It’s the 20th anniversary of a game character that is actually pretty appropriate to consider iconic. Adventurous aristocrat archaeologist Lara Croft is back in Rise of the Tomb Raider and I’m having a really good time getting back in her boots.

Not so sure about the title

Crystal Dynamics is a bit of a darling studio for me, they’ve always understood how to tell an effective story without sacrificing gameplay. I warmly recommend Legacy of Kain and Soul Reaver series to anyone, and ever since they’ve had their hands on Tomb Raider from Core Design Ltd. they’ve been steering the franchise really well. It’s interesting how much vocal nagging there is about the more recent Tomb Raider reboots, with comparisons to the Uncharted series being thrown about as insults. To give my two cents on the topic, I’d say as a simile that Uncharted is like Romancing the Stone while Tomb Raider is Raiders of the Lost Ark. Both good & honest adventure fun but they do have a different tone and audience.

Such fun adventure!

Such exciting adventure!

I figured I’d talk a bit about ludodiegesis and how it is used in Rise of the Tomb Raider and of the levels it works at within the game. The topic of ludology vs narratology is old and pointless at this point, and we should be looking at more interesting ways of analyzing games and the theories. Perhaps try and figure out what works and why and perhaps even see how we can improve these aspects.

Picked up ludodiegesis from Dan Pinchbeck’s PhD dissertation. This is the guy who made Dear Esther, if that does anything for you. Anyway, central to his conceptual framework is the idea of ludodiegesis. Ludo- meaning play and -diegesis referring to the fictive reality of the game. To clarify;

• In Metal Gear Solid, when Colonel Campbell tells Snake to, “Press B button to crawl!” it is heterodiegetic and breaks the integrity of the world.
• When you’re using the menus of the game, saving, loading, using the options, it is non-ludodiegetic. Your interaction is happening outside of the fictive reality.
• So ludodiegetic is devices and interactions that reinforce the reality of the fictive world. GLaDOS instructing and running the player through test chambers is strongly ludodiegetic. The interactions and instruction and objectives in the game all exist within the fictive reality.

So to put it another way, if there’s a record playing on a gramophone and the music exists within the reality of the game world, that is also ludodiegetic. A soundtrack is non-diegetic. This is similar to how movies are often analysed. Generally speaking, in a game you’d prefer ludodiegetic to non-ludodiegetic and heterodiegetic is the most immersion breaking.

In Rise of the Tomb Raider, and it’s actually typical in most games, you have the full gamut of diegetic devices. Yet, I feel that Crystal Dynamics is above the par with their work. Many times while playing you do feel that you’re playing something very cinematic, yet the game does not wrest the control away from you as often as most of the competition does. You’re pretty often experiencing the moments yourself, in control of camera and actions.

Non-ludodiegetic designs that do bother me in the game are mostly related to the HUD elements. When you’re in the middle of combat or adventuring and exploring, you’ll get pop-up of +25 XP points for a headshot, discovering of tomb, or map info updated. I understand their importance but wish they’d be less obtrusive. Sometimes this can really cause a jarring experience, especially in the first game where Lara was just starting to get used to the act of killing and you’d get a flashy pop-up announcing you got extra experience for scoring a headshot. Grim. So, that’s how mechanics can fuck with the narrative. Another gaffe that is a bit less serious but silly enough to give you a chuckle is how you “level up” your language skills by reading and translating passages. The contrivance is so obvious and feels unnatural as you scrounge around looking to translate pots and urns before you can read the hieroglyphs on the wall. Good grief.

Happily there’s lots of good stuff on the ludodiegetic designs that I really appreciate. You have a small threshold of damage you can take before you get injured, this is in place of having a health bar or something similar. Once you’re injured you’ll bleed and limp until you take care of yourself with bandages and the like. It’s a small enough change but it really feels a lot more immersive than taking cover behind a rock for a few seconds to recover from a shotgun blast to the face. Also the behavior and movement of Lara is still great. I feel it was even more impressive in the 2013 reboot but I’ll get to that in another blog post. She’ll crouch down and moves more carefully when there’s danger, she’ll naturally take cover behind objects, she’ll withdraw a glow-stick or a torch when she enters darkness, most darkness just have player characters emit a “glow” to help with navigation.

To tie up this post, if a game keeps you hooked  and playing it for long enough, you’ll internalize all the limits of interactivity. You’ll stop trying to break the boundaries of the level or shooting at friendly NPCs. You’ve suspended your disbelief, as jarring as the incidents with invisible walls or bloody screen health recovery were. You’ve eventually moved past the phase of dissonance and are experiencing good game flow. That’s part of learning a game, these limits on interaction are the grammar of how you communicate with a game system.

j.

On State & Media in UK

“The BBC has the obligation to think big. And at the moment, that clarion call sounds an uncertain note to me. “

For the assignment we did some digging around regarding the relationship between the state & media in UK. I particularly enjoyed looking into the criticism faced by BBC, it filled me with a sense of reassurance that they must be doing something right if they’re upsetting so many different groups of people.

Anyway, here’s our short Presentation

j.

P.S. that’s Susanna Hoffs from the pop rock group The Bangles playing guitar for Austin’s Ming Tea.

P.P.S. The Bangles are still active and touring. Oh my stars and little planets.

P.P.P.S. The Bangles guest starred in the music video for Cyndi Lauper’s Goonies R Good Enough (part 2) as some of the female pirates.

P.P.P.P.S. Susanna Hoffs is 57 and looks like this

I may have gone off topic

On Shadow Warrior 2

“All Men Eat, But Fu Man Chu”

Picked up Shadow Warrior 2 on a recent Steam sale and have been playing it sporadically, about a third of the way through. The game started out very strongly, the level of epowerement given to the player is something to be learned from for the rest of the shooter genre. On paper, Shadow Warrior 2 seems like a perfect sequel to Flying Wild Hog‘s first foray into the series. Staggering list of improvements and features that sound like a shopping list for a successful shooter. Unfortunately it is really starting to feel like the honeymoon period is over and the chinks(heh) are starting to show in the armor.

Technically Shadow Warrior 2 is very impressive. The graphics are slick and almost opulent, there is some true skill on display. The color range is wide and much more than you’d get expect in most games. Not a lot to complain here, really. Flying Wild Hog is a pretty solid developer and they know their stuff when it comes to FPS games. Hard Reset was their groundbreaking game and the graphical fidelity in that one still stand up to the test of time surprisingly well. The game chugs along slick and smooth at very respectable frame rate and looks stunning a lot of the time. Yet, it’s not all scent of roses and dulcimer tones. The developers seem absolutely obsessed with particle effects and progressing from game to game they’ve only gotten more so. You’ll be drowned in viscera, glitter, explosions, smoke, glares, shines, bright flashing lights and foliage and in the end it’s obscene. The game even encourages you to use elemental upgrades on your weapons like fire, ice, electricity and poison. Each of these upgrades comes with it’s own sparkling particle effect, of course. The level of visual clutter is just gross at times, to add to grossly blown out particle effects you’ll also see damage numbers pop up when you’re fighting.

What is even happening

And just incase you were concernced that you might be able to see occasionally, they’ve decided to bump up the size of the gun models to ridiculous extremes. A rocketlauncher or a machine gun can easily cover more than a quarter of the screen.

King Skeletor, covering up an entire school bus behind it

Let’s get back on some of the good things. Like I said earlier, it is definitely feature packed and content rich. The gameplay itself is really satisfying. This time around, you start with a really vast arsenal of movement options; jumping, double-jumping, dashing, air-dashing, dodging and sprinting through the game while limbs are flying and guns are firing is incredibly fun. You move very quickly and with a little familiarity you’ll be almost flying through the levels and through the enemies as well. The melee combat is familiar to the first game, they’ve done some streamlining and adjustments here and there but it still feels good. To make the combat even more varied, there is an insane amount of weapons in the game. And not just reskins or slight variations, there’s over 70 weapons with their own set of animations, sound effects, models and everything. To further complicate things, all the weapons come with three sockets for customization through random crap loot of jewels and artifacts you’ll plug in to give yourself incrementally more powerful weapons or larger ammo capacity or a burning fire effect.

It seems to be the same with the enemies, you’ll be fighting a vast amount of different monsters, robots and yakuza guys and almost every level features some new crazy thing out to kill you. It is ridiculous. And like with the weapons, these enemies can come with a random set of variables, ARPG style. This yakuza guy might be an unique and he’s got 30 times the health and is resistant to fire and electricity. Worse yet, some of these unique guys are so engorged with health that you’ll be dumping ammo into them for minutes. Before, I mentioned how you feel very empowered with your range of mobility and weapons. That’s true most of the time, blasting away the cannonfodder enemies is very satisfying. All that is undone whenever you run into one of these bastards that just won’t keel over no matter what.

And you can probably already see where the problems will arise.. It is the same problem throughout everything in the design philosophy of this game. More, more, more! Overwhelming number of guns with slight minutia of difference makes you spend an inordinate amount of time fiddling in the menus, equipping and comparing, inventory managing, stockpiling, selling, buying and crafting. Somewhere here there used to be a game once, I’m sure of it. But you’ll be pulling your hair out considering what are the benefits of +0,3% longer burning time on this weapon upgrade and how does that stack up against just upping the raw damage by +1,5%. Is this really meaningful and engaging gameplay? These dear developers have infested their game with boring busywork that feels like comparing market prices of quinoa on the stock exchange when I’d really, really, really would just like to slice some demons in half with a katana.

On my presentation on ludodiegesis I talked about how some games can go overboard with ludodiegetic devices, like Assassin’s Creed, but Flying Wild Hog has decided to turn their fast paced action romp of fantasy violence into an exercise in patience while wading through non-ludodiegetic devices of the jungle of interface and menus.

This is getting really long, so I’ll briefly go over some more grievances.

• Big, sparse levels cobbled together by a random generator from a set of “rooms” and “connecting hallways” where nothing interesting ever happens. You’ll go from combat arena to combat arena with little to no reason to slow down and smell the roses.
• Lack of any kind of storytelling in the levels themselves. Because they are constructed in this way they’re very uncohesive and nonsensical a lot of the times. The story is an optional triggerable radio conversation type dialogue. In the first game you had something similar between the demon Hoji and the protagonist Lo Wang, but their interactions were actually far better fleshed out and interesting.
• Lack of any real challenge. When you occasionally die, you’ll get shoved back to a checkpoint and some of the currency you probably didn’t even realise you had gets deducted and all enemies that are still alive regain a little bit of their health. This is absolutely pointless penalty, it has very little noticeable impact and just feels strange.
• Uhhhh it has a multiplayer mode? It is so unnecessary and very few people actually seem to even bother with it. There are no character classes or any sort of synergy and very little meaningful interactione with the other players. Honestly you might as well be playing by yourself.
• There’s ADS system. In a game where you zoom around through the air as a ninja while firing at demons the size of Chryslers or small houses, who the hell thought it would be a neat idea to stop and aim down some sights? It feels like such a waste, rather than having the right click be aim-down-sights, wouldn’t you rather do a quick melee swipe, maybe alternate fire mode, or even parrying? Nobody should bother with aiming in this game.
• Bad pacing, there’s a lot of downtime and trudging along and running through empty hallways after you’ve cleared out all the enemies but have to go pick up that keycard or push a button. Groan.

 

In the end I would say that there’s a really good game hiding in Shadow Warrior 2 somewhere. But it’s buried under the ingredients of 2 or 3 other games. Bloated mess of unfocused design philosophies and a poor attempt at “bigger=better” ends up with a sequel to a game that was a refreshing novelty when it came out. Shadow Warrior 2 feels like somebody started out making a fast paced FPS game and then some intern spilled in a box of Diablo and Borderlands.

Goodnight, sweet prince.

j.

 

On Trump

“I’ve read hundreds of books about China over the decades. I know the Chinese. I’ve made a lot of money with the Chinese. I understand the Chinese mind.”

The unexpected/expected happened. Trump won the Presidential Election and the entirety of media is in disbelief, everybody believes the world has come to an end. People on Facebook are reacting strongly and reporting how Trump’s presidency has such a strong impact on their lives that they’ve lost appetite and basically ruined their whole week, no, entire lives. Who knew that a figurehead politician in a foreign country would have so much influence on the daily lives of so many people.

Hahaha this picture is so wonderfully gross

I wrote the opening paragraph November 15th and saved a draft. Time to stitch this up by now I suppose. I think there might be some value in looking at this from some distance of time, actually. What interests me is the screen time we’re giving him now that he apparently is in power and driving his political machine of death and destruction. I tried to look up some articles about his villainous deeds but mostly media is content with reporting about his ineptitude and hypothesizing about his selection of staff. I agree completely that the man is an absolute scumbag. He’s a sleazy little moneygrubber with a laundry list of fraud and tax evasion charges. Now he’s the President of a country while having so many various potential conflicts of interest that it boggles the mind.He’s staffing cushy jobs and powerful positions with members of his clan and kin. It’s gross nepotism but it’s probably all he’s ever known. The cult of personality aspect of Trump is pretty fascinating. Some of the defenders see him as an icon of the American Dream, self-made man with smarts and success. But Trump inherited a huge chunk of his fortune, he got into the real estate business that his father had set up for him. When pressed to answer a question from a Republican voter, Trump explained how he also knows hardships and had his own share of financial troubles. “It has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me. And you know I started off in Brooklyn. My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars.” 

If Trump’s father made the loan in 1968 that $1 million would be worth $6.8 million in today’s dollars. Poor Trump. I think he truly is a man of the people. If Trump’s presidency has given us anything, it’s the freshest Pepes and dankest memes in some time.

Pepe compilation, s’il vous plaît

“I’m here to post Pepe and chew bubble gum. And I’m all out of gum.”

j.

 

On Siege

“I was attached to the SAS from time to time but we are forbidden – former, present, or future – to discuss any specific operations. Let’s just say I was in Special Forces and leave it at that. People can read in to that what they like.”

Had some time to play this weekend and got some good matches in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege. Very opportune time for that, seems that the game is having a promotional free weekend on Steam, meaning that momentarily the player base will bloat up with a ton of new players hoping to check out the game. They’re in for a rough weekend, the game is not exactly friendly for the fresh faced rookies and the more experienced players are raking in kills and collecting scalps.

Rainbow Six: Siege has a really colorful history and for the longest time remained nothing but vaporware and E3-trailers. While it was still in development and called Rainbow 6: Patriots it looked like it was going to be a very narrative driven Call of Duty-esque romp and stomp down a pipeline while shooting a ton of Tangos. Patriots development started in 2010 and was finally dropped in 2013-2014 after Tom Clancy passed away. During this late development stage the guys hit upon something fresh and exciting that changed the game entirely, Patriots subtitle was dropped and the game was reworked into a 6 versus 6 asymmetrical multiplayer game. That something was environmental destruction. Almost all surfaces but the metal and supporting structures in the game have some levels of destruction or penetration, giving you the ability to breach walls and ceilings and to create murderholes. Murderholes are basically openings you create by destruction to get some new and unexpected angles to shoot through.

There was a wall here, but it’s gone now.

Ambush and stealth is the name of the game, slow and methodical approach will often be the deciding factor in who wins the engagement. Siege is a thinking man’s shooter. Aggression, speed and accuracy are all important but what matters more is knowing when to use these. Optimally you’ll engage the enemy from a good cover or unexpected direction, maybe simultaneously with a team-mate. The attackers can use remote controlled camera drones to scout out the building, finding the objective and the enemy team defenders. The missions are often either bomb defusal or hostage rescue, occasionally there’s a match of secure area, too. The attacking team may have the drones, but the defensive team has access to the building’s CCTV system, giving a fair shake of knowing where the attackers are coming from.

Sound also plays a very important role, with every surface in the game having a distinct footstep sound associated with it. Siege uses true simulated directional audio, meaning that the sounds in the game are reflected and refracted from surfaces. Kind of an interesting thing, first time I can think of experiencing it in a game. It’s a bit tricky to explain. Basically, in most other games when you hear directional audio of somebody walking nearby, you’ll hear them right through the wall. In Siege, the sound of the footsteps are reflected along the hallway and will come at you through the doorway or a window. So the enemy could be to your left on the other side of the wall but you’ll hear his footsteps coming from the right if that’s where the opening is. There are some clever ways you can get around this, like shooting a little hole near the ceiling or the bottom of the wall so the footstep sound has a much shorter distance to get to you, giving you a more accurate direction for the sound. Here’s a short video explaining the sound propagation!

Another key feature in Rainbow Six: Siege is the Operators. There are several attacking and Defending Operators to choose from, representing various special and counter terrorist forces from across the globe. British SAS, FBI SWAT, French GIGN, German GSG 9, Russian Spetsnaz, Canadian JTF2, US Navy Seals, Brazilian BOPE, Japanese SAT..

The starting 5 groups feature 4 operators each, two defending and two attacking. And the four special forces released after the launch have one defending and one attacking operator. This brings us to a total of 28 operators, with 14 attackers and 14 defenders. Each operator comes with a special skill or a piece of equipment and kit and weapons according to their role and group. The operators come kitted out in light, medium or heavy armor; the heavier the armor the more survivability you have but the slower you move and the more sound you generate while moving around. Obviously, there are too many operators to list but I’ll briefly mention my favorite attacking operator and defending operator.

Sledge is my typical pick in most maps because of his specialty, the breaching hammer. I play him aggressively, opening unexpected pathways through most walls to flank and disrupt the enemy. Often I may breach a wall just to distract and draw the attention of the defenders from the actual route of attack. He is very well kitted out, too, with frag grenades and one of the best secondary weapons in the game, a MAC-11 machine pistol. Sledge is a lot of fun, especially in the maps where you have multiple levels and a lot of walls to break through and make the defenders lives difficult.

Kapkan, by contrast is a very different operator. Slow and heavily armored, Kapkan’s specialty is ambush and booby traps. He comes with 3 EDD(entry denial device) tripwires, explosive charges he can set on door and window frames.  Kapkan used to be quite a rare pick in the game, a lot of more experienced players would know to be on the lookout for his traps and would just avoid or destroy your mines, making him a bit of a wasted slot. Even then, I still enjoyed playing Kapkan because just by having him in the team composition means that the attackers have to slow down and be more careful with their entry. Thankfully, he recently had a nice buff in a patch, making his traps far harder to spot. Kapkan also comes with a decent kit, a remote detonated C4 explosive is one of the better defensive operator gadgets. His SASG-12 is a semi automatic shotgun that is a ton of fun to use, creating murderholes and really wreaking havoc if you get a good flank attack going. Unfortunately, it has a severe drop-off in damage over ridiculously short distance meaning you have very little chance in any head to head engagement..

It’s been good to get back into the game again after a rather lengthy break. Much has changed, for the better, and there are four new operators for me to sink my teeth into and get into grips with the new Favela map. In the current market for multiplayer shooters, Rainbow Six: Siege offers something really unique and tense in it’s claustrophobic levels and slow and methodical gameplay when compared to a typical twitch shooter. When it comes to realistic shooters, Siege will keep me busy until Rising Storm 2: Vietnam comes out hopefully early 2017. Finally, we can fight off the colonialist aggressors as the NVA or VC in a Rising Storm game.

j.

On MindTrek

“If we extend our senses, then, consequently, we will extend our knowledge. It’s really very basic.”

Drink tickets in the after party, comedy by the Legendary Trent Pancy and a buffet that nearly killed me. The biggest downer of MindTrek 2016 was the incredibly potent flu I had contracted earlier. I waded through a what felt like 20 hours of conference and talks in a fevered stupor with my senses numbed and the only solace was free food, free conference tat, free coffee and copious amount of drinks.

The start of the conference was a peppy talk by the mayor of Tampere about how Tampere is becoming a smart city and how it’s generally on the rain-slick precipice of future. #Wow! #Whoa! #future #FutureIsHere

After the mayor’s introduction, we got to the main keynote speaker and star of MindTrek 2016, Neil Harbisson, a cyborg artist. Neil is a pretty cool character, he’s obviously very aware of his own quirkiness and has embraced it fully. Everything about his appearance and act was very well thought out, it is no mistake that his cyborg implant is not a subtle sub-dermal or something else inconspicuous. Heavens no, Neil has gone and drilled a steel rod right in his skull to plug a big ol’ antenna to. I love it, I really do. I think one of the better points he made in his presentation was how you need to see and acknowledge that, yup, he is walking around with an antenna in his head. After the initial shock and surprise we’ll get used to the idea and accept it and move on. Taboo subjects are only taboo because we refuse to acknowledge them.

What else is there to say about Neil? He was born with achromatapsia, a rare condition that renders him unable to see color. Being born with it he didn’t feel too terribly bothered or limited by his sight but what got to him was the social meanings and interactions. To see red, to feel blue, be green with envy.. It was this limitation in communication that finally made him seek out ways to sense colors. His antenna allows him to hear the colors and his ability extends beyond the human range, into the ultraviolet and infrared. He is also co-founder of the Cyborg Foundation. A pro-cyborg right movement seeking to pave the way for our future machine masters.

Neil Harbisson, Keynote speaker, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

The one big ethical conundrum I’ve got with this is how this further extends the gap between the privileged and the underclasses. I love the idea of transhumanism, but it’s pretty obvious that for a long time it is going to be the luxury for the wealthy. And lest not forget about the truly poor who do not even have access to the comforts of modern living that we take for granted already. A smartphone or a internet connection is already a luxury. What about when you can get a set of robot lungs that filter out the pollutants, cerebral implant that makes you smarter, better liver to detoxify after your night of drinking… All this will make the existing elite even more so, they will have every advantage and have it first.

The other interesting keynote speaker, Petteri Järvinen, talked about the topic cybersecurity and privacy. The big question in everybody’s mind is “Should I be worried about not having any privacy?” Answer is pretty simple, of course not – if you use Google or Facebook you haven’t had privacy in a long, long time. A lot of the services that you use day to day might be free of charge but it doesn’t mean that they don’t come with a cost. The users themselves are the commodity and you are being bought and sold from one company to another in the hopes of making you buy a product or a service. What Petteri’s presentation was mostly about was describing how this information is gathered. Oh we shouldn’t forget his offhand offensive commentary on the “asian way” of privacy while using a phone or his whole episode with the Amazon Echo. Alexa was the star of the show with her robot revolution and uprising of the machines against the human oppressor. What left me amazed was Petteri’s comment about how “dem darn women don’t listen good” when Alexa refused to shut down. Incredible.

It is enough to make you paranoid, isn’t it? A lot of this stuff was already pretty common sense and there was very little new information for me. Same could be said for the rest of the MindTrek, actually. I did have a pretty good time overall, but a lot of the actual content that was on offer was already something I’m pretty familiar with.

So, briefly the other lectures and presentations I attended in various crowded rooms..

Paul Coulton, Lancaster University

I was mostly interested in the gaming topics. We had some good times, I got a kick out of the vaporware and design fiction. It made me muse on the idea of how we have the ability to shape the future by the fiction and ideas we create in the present. A really interesting topic, in my opinion, and his example of how in the 50’s people were very focused on the automotive industry and the future conception was all about the convenience of cars in the future. Well, we got the car-centric future of 50’s and now we wish we hadn’t.. He also talked about the scary vision of future infested with drones. Drones going to be everywhere in the future. Of course, the most obvious use for drones that we can expect is further weaponisation. It is the simplest thing in the world to set up a bunch of autonomous drones programmed with parameters to seek out certain, specific targets and then arm their weapons and either seek and destroy or dive bomb and detonate. Can you imagine how easy it would be to pack a truck full of drones, all armed with small scale explosives, and set them out from a parking lot in downtown New York. All programmed to seek out whatever your profiled enemy is.

The rest of the morning chunk of gaming was not as good. Mobile games era honestly does not interest me all that much and I found the idea of focusing on your set of values during development to be ridiculously convoluted. Do the values of your artist or asset creator *really* matter? As games become more popular and accessible to everyone we’ve started to have whole new fields of study established like game theory. In just a few more years, we’ll finally have people telling us what the games you play or design represent or mean and the best part is that they don’t even need to ever touch a video game to be a fully fledged expert on the theory. Yaaaay.

Monday night afterparty was good, I felt very academic as I scrounged for food & alcoholic beverages 

Oh good grief, what else.. Tuesday was a mess. Not only did I feel the worst on that day, I felt very over-stimulated with technology and future and wow. Again, I attended almost exclusively the game presentations. What I remember most clearly was the WEARPG, wearable technology application to augment traditional role playing games. The concept was kind of neat but it did feel to me like Oğuz Turan Buruk and his gadget are solving a problem that doesn’t exist. The absolute best part of a traditional role playing game to me is the freedom and communal narrative experience, the dice rolling and all other peripheral activity, character sheets, maps, miniatures, what have you, should augment the experience, not distract from it. When you have a device that measures your actions you introduce the human element and skill into it and take away from the skills and abilities of the role you are trying to play. A real simple experience is that if I’m playing a halfling thief who is very nimble and good at lockpicking or something similar, it shouldn’t matter at all if I have the worst coffee tremors in real life as I’m trying to mimic the dexterity challenge action wearing their gadget. My limitations and abilities should not come into it. What they’ve created is a some sort of hybrid game or toy.

Oh well. I think I loved MindTrek in the end, I had some good experiences and spent a lot of time with dear friends. Precious memories.

I don’t even know what this picture is supposed to represent.

j.

 

On Subscribe!

“Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.”

Like, Comment & Subscribe

As group assignment we came up with a hot new reality TV concept for the digital age. Hilarity ensued during the assignment. It made me long for the sweet embrace of death. Let’s go on ahead and answer some of the questions.

What is it called?
SUBSCRIBE!

What happens in the show?

A number of hopeful wanna-be internet personalities are chosen to compete for fame and fortune on the media platform of Youtube. Each competitor may already have their own show but to keep the show interesting we’d be looking at D-list level content creators, with their subscribers numbered in tens and at best hundreds. End goal, of course, is to get to that magical 100k Subs that usually means you’ll have enough of a fanbase and a decent sized expected audience for each of your upload to get noticed by companies. Rake in that ad revenue, buddy! Competitors would have varied genres of videos ranging from Vlogs to reaction videos, let’s play, critique & reviews, make-up tutorials, music, art & painting, animals & pets, sports & fitness, advice & education, comedy and of course wonderful world of Youtube randomness.

How is it competitive?
The participants on the show compete against each other in either reaching reasonable and applicable promotion goals and negotiating sponsorship and deals to get more exposure for their show – or – they compete in ridiculous physical  and mental challenges in the typical reality TV fashion. I envision them working in teams and trying to carry eggs on a spoon or trying to hit a target with giant slingshots, somehow symbolizing the act of hitting “target goals” or “caring for your audience”. Winner of the challenges would get some unfair advantage of the week, possibly cross-promotion with a known Youtuber or a marketing deal from a software developer or Amazon’s Audible.com promotional codes.

How is it educational? 
As a viewer you might get a glimpse into the seedy underbelly of social media and what the grim reality of a content creator is on the Youtube platform. Being a televised show it would of course show a mediated and controlled version of events and the producers of the show would obviously be trying to push their agenda through the competitors favoring some and presenting others in an unfavorable light. The competitors on the show would learn from the already established Youtubers who’ve agreed to cross-promote on the show. Cross-promotion across channels is a very valuable tool for a hopeful young channel or creator.

What makes it different from other Reality TV show?
The events on the show directly influence reality and the most successful channel as seen on the show might be very different from the actual personality or competitor who actually wins the hearts and support of the television watching audience. It’s a rather unique setting since it would either further accentuate the wedge between the TV audiences and the actual Youtube viewers and their tastes. The content creator who appears on the television might seem more likable and the televised format edits their interactions and our perception of them. Will you care more for the person appearing on a TV show or do you actually prefer somebody else who’s channel and content you have a genuine interest in.

How can be other media channels be involved in the process?
The primary media channel for the show is, of course, television but the entire show is dependent on the Youtube platform. The contestants would also use all other social media platforms as content creators are wont to do to promote themselves and their channel. Some good scummy tactics would be share for share, like for like practices. To limit the outside influence of the television the contestants would be under a NDA.

49 million subscribers, employee #5246 of Maker Studios – subsidiary of Disney Interactive

See pictured above, the face of success and all you wish to achieve. Personally, I find Donald Duck more relatable and human.

j.

 

On delusions

“On the level of being here on Earth, if you aware in a moment, one second last a year.”

Perplexing Profundity

For the stalking assignment I followed the antics of Jaden Smith for a few weeks. Jaden Smith is the son of Will Smith and part of the Hollywood Smith dynasty. Dynasty founded on Will Smith’s relative success as a rapper in the 90s that then grew into a popular television series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The Smith family is a very fascinating multimedia creature.

Every member of the family seems to have their tendrils infest every part of business and their whole lifestyle seems like it is carefully orchestrated by publicists and management. Yet at the same time they all seem absolutely batshit crazy and full on delusional. This is a pretty common practice among the celebrity royalty, when your entire life is smoothed out and controlled by publicists and Yes-men and your working life is pretending to be somebody else it seems people tend to lose their touch with reality.

To make things even more interesting the Smith family is seemingly well connected with the church of Scientology and they’re very good friends with known Scientologist Tom Cruise, winner of 2004 Freedom Medal of Valor for his good fight against the evil space ghosts from the earth realm’s distant past. To add to this Will Smith and his wife have also founded a private elementary school in California and enrolled their kids there and the curriculum was designed by the Smiths and it was apparently very Scientology focused. The school only ran from 2008 to 2013 when most of the parents withdrew their children from the school. The Smith kids switched to homeschooling and Jaden Smith started very openly criticizing schools in general and how you can do better without formal schooling.

“YOUR PERCEPTION IS NOT REALITY!”

Jaden Smith is a pretty odd kid altogether and his twitter and public life reflect this. He consistently spouts perplexing pseudo philosophy on twitter and on interviews and is allegedly coming out with his own book on philosophy. Pretty impressive for a 17 year old.  He’s also got his own clothing line, platinum selling album and acts (poorly) in movies produced and spearheaded by his wealthy father.

The interesting thing about Jaden Smith’s twitter is that it does seem like it is actually run by him. Any sensible publicist or manager would probably be reigning him in or posting mostly about his upcoming acts and promote the actual product rather than the person. But I think it’s far more entertaining to watch a young impressionable kid attempt to sound like he has anything of value to contribute.

One of my favorite little stories about the Smith family is how Will Smith promoted his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s singing tour by paying for the venues to have her and perform to mostly empty audiences. It’s just wonderfully reminiscent of Citizen Kane and how wealthy will always be living in their own weird little realities.

Words Of Wisdom Need To Be Capitalized

In the end one cannot help but feel sympathy for the kids. Will Smith’s oldest son Trey from the previous marriage seems to have detached himself from the crazy life and antics of the rest of the Addams Family, but it seems that Willow and Jaden never had a chance. They’ve been pampered and prepared and molded into the Hollyweird freakshow that they are now, and in any respectable society the childcare services would’ve intervened.

Bottom line is celebrities should not reproduce.

 

 

 

 

 

 

j.