Direct Download: MP3
Episode Description:
To hell with E3, the podcast arrives over a month late to talk about a not-important article that’s already been completely forgotten. Better yet, everyone shares their favorite storytelling techniques for interactive media. WORLD 'SCLUSIVE!
Episode #82, ft. Godamn_Milkman, shrug, sleepysmiles, Birch and Tulpa
see you at #E3, hotstuff 
Correction: the game I talk about is Tetris Plus. The Tetris with a story is Magical Tetris Challenge (which is insane)
sexy title.
What the hell when did this even happen
I meant to mention how sniper elite UNFORTUNATELY shows a spitzer bullet in the slow mo killcam even when you’re firing the .45 acp carbine but I just didn’t manage to work it in!!!
The cold open to this episode is the most selectbutton moment ever recorded.
I need to be in the next podcast! I miss them
Agreed.
“Ramses, has anyone played that besides me?”
“No, what’s this?”
“Not even you have played that.”
“Well, no I haven’t…”
I feel judged for being a Babysitters’ Club fan
Wondering if multiple endings and branching character trees and even just the knowledge of there being a possibility space to any choice too easily just encourages completionist psychopathy and unless your narrative is expressly about that habit at some level, that priority set is going to undermine anything else your piece of interactive fiction is really going for more often than not
Blame the player, not the game?
a shameful display of puyo puyo Canon ignorance in this podcast. @ferrets must be rolling in her grave
I guess but there are going to be ways to disenfranchise that sort of player behaviour that can only be the dev’s responsibility
Like at a basic level don’t make fucking literal checklists in the log/inventory screens
Truth. I think shorter games with more obfuscation and less itemization are valuable in general, but particularly if they want to tell a decent story.
Night in the Woods is a great example (i should have taken more notes, i had a lot i wanted to say about that game but it came out as a ramble). There are missable character interactions, but they’re not so granular that you’d have to play the game more than once if you were reasonably thorough. There are basically two major character stories you can follow, and seeing both would necessitate a second play, but either one is dramatically satisfying and coherent with the themes of the story. The pace is gentle and emphasis is placed on accepting your character’s flaws and mistakes, so you don’t feel pressured to game it in an optimal way. And it’s relatively short, so if you wanted to do a second playthrough to try alternate paths, it wouldn’t be an interminable time tax. Basically, it’s the best Persona game 
Feel like Undertale got a lot of the same things right, though it pushed more for a “right” way to play and made the “wrong” way into an explicit critique of 100% completion – which i really like on a meta level, but also feel slightly conflicted about since “why did you put this in the game if you didn’t want anyone to experience it?” feels like a fair response. NitW is less critical.
Basically: i like a narrative-driven game with a ranged possibility space, but they don’t often enough hit the sweet-spot of breadth:depth that makes a single play satisfying on its own terms.
Also yeah fuck all ingame checklists forever.
you’re right, I died specifically to do this
I think KRZ does the best job of discouraging me to replay it out of everything I have played, but that’s mostly because it’s so dense and you can’t save scum.
When I figured out you could quit in the middle of a conversation, I did that a decent amount, but stuff I couldn’t do that for I just didn’t worry about it.
I think, and video game narratives have barely tapped into this, making failure an intrinsic part of play and narrative will discourage save scumming as a practice and we’ll return to that quasi golden era of people thinking that ‘bad endings’ that depend on fucking stuff up are somehow lesser than ‘good endings’.
Maybe that’s idealistic of me. I don’t think narratively relevant achievements/trophies should be a thing in games though.
Sorry if I ever contradict anything I say in a podcast, I have no idea what I am at any point in time.