I am on the discord thing. Give a shout when a game is popping I guess.
i am Online
I havenât had time to play this â is there a 1p mode? Iâm hesitant to play a game against other people that Iâve never played before, but if I can practice then Iâm cool.
there is arcade mode where you play against a series of bots with different AI wirings / fields
also you can arrange a custom match against these same bots on a field of your choosing
itâs not much as practice compared to most players tbh â many moving / shooting patterns that you only get through actual human strategy. but i guess it can make you more confortable in doing certain generic observations and reactions mid-game
I think the last stage of arcade mode is actually really good practice, if you can go toe toe with those guys consistently I think youâll be able to handle yourself against human opponents.
Hello! Videoball is now playable online using Parsec game-streaming on PC! This fixes the horribly broken physics, teleporting, machine-gun fire, and otherwise fucked vanilla online by simulating a local multiplayer session over the internet via screen-sharing. Join the (new) discord!
ATTENTION ALL VIDEOBALLERS
We no longer use the internal Online options in the game itself. For better performance and other benefits, we now use Parsec for online multiplayer. Parsec is a free screen-sharing application which allows us to play online as if we were all playing on the same local machine. Only the host needs to have the game installed; everyone else just needs to have the local Parsec client installed and a Parsec account.
PARSEC CLIENT GUIDE
1. Go to https://parsecgaming.com/
2. Download the client
3. Create an account
4. Sign in
5. Send a friend request to meauxdal #833284
You do NOT have to own a copy of Videoball for this to work. You just wonât be able to host.
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come play some VIDEOBALL with us !
holy shiiiiiiiit
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Hell yeah
Vive la VIDEOBALL
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I would be down, I had a lot of fun with this game at Bumpass!
weâre right now looking for a host (if you have good upload bandwidth) and a fourth player in the discord if youâre THAT down
Can not do tonight unfortunately! Also I donât own the game. But I DO have good upload bandwidth, and ten bucks. So another time Iâm down! Iâll get on the discord.
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Apparently, the mythical local versus-only Videoball Black Label is available as a free download if you DM @108 on twitter with a photo of you, 3 other humans, and 4 windows-compatible controllers.
I donât have any friends, so Iâm passing this info along to you all.
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Iâm coming off of reading this and it is sparking all sorts of thoughts with video games and sports and toxicity and all of it
this move to virtual sporting events is really damn interesting as it coincides with a rise in prominent players talking about toxicity in riot games, especially now that valorant is out. there were some articles about a game dev on valorant who was a woman receiving sexual harassment from other players when they found out she was a woman, and a lot of pro league of legends players are talking about how itâs impossible to solo queue now because of the toxicity. there was also some stuff with why league didnât have voice chat, with the reasoning being that it would allow for too much toxicity, but this was countered with players who would just troll and run it down in one lane over and over until the game ended
so you have toxicity in riot games and people wondering âhow do we solve this problemâ and toxicity in virtual professional racing games and people wondering âhow do we solve this problemâ and the answer to both (to me) seems to be âdesign a different gameâ
all of this is entering this big brain stew and it reminds me a LOT about timâs GDC talk a few years back before videoball came out where he talks about how clumsy physical sports are. like the concept of a foul in basketball is only necessary because at some point we want to protect players from physical challenges that would result in significant harm; if the players were playing virtual basketball then fouls donât really make any sense OTHER THAN TO enforce a simulation of real world professional basketball that people are agreeing to play
with games like videoball (and rocket league to a lesser extent), the solution here is to remove all of those possibilities from the game space so that the only real way to leave the agreed upon magic circle is to either actively work against your own specified team OR put the controller down and walk away. at which point, what the fuck are you doing how much time do you have that you can just waste it by being present but refusing to participate in this ritual come on
it just seems weird to me that most of the solutions around toxicity in competitive video games involve moderation of some sort, and that moderation is predominantly related to text/voice communication. like thereâs no real acknowledgment of the magic circle, no ability for the players to acknowledge their role within the space, and no ability for the players to eject someone from the space in a way that prevents their participation. none of these moderation solutions solves for me being an asshole racist, realizing that a player on my team is a PoC, and then actively griefing them while the game continues
physical sports have already solved this problem: if you punch me in the face on purpose while weâre all playing basketball, if the group is playing in good faith, everyone physically separates you from me and we probably stop inviting you to pickup games. professional sports solved it by both fining and disallowing players to play. but again and again the question is the same: âhow do we prevent player toxicity in video games?â and as time goes on it seems like the solution gets closer to âgive the game developers the ability to inflict physical and economic harm onto a person for participating in unsportsmanlike conductâ
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this might be the first nuanced political issue around eSports Iâve actually found interesting
Like you intimated, stripping out social functions is the only really effective way to block toxicity. Designing away fouls and mistakes doesnât stop it; as long as the game has a competitive framework (heck, even without it) players will harass others. But those social features are important and meaningful to players and games that have removed them are just less social, itâs just avoiding the problem entirely.
I think itâs been this open, festering problem that may not be solvable.
Games like Journey and Chris Bellâs Way were engaged attempts to deal with this by designing the game towards cooperation and friendliness and theyâre almost a decade old now. They didnât solve anything for games, I think, because their answers are so restrictive; they assume non-competition, and heavily restricted communication. I think back to Microsoftâs attempt to set up The Underground for 360 gamers to abuse each other; like most player divisors, they ended up shutting it down because even the largest multiplayer games benefit from grouping players together to reduce match seek times.
I think the most successful tools have been social structures that encourage players to talk to and play with people they know. Like a lot of things, Bungie was way out in front with its party system. Getting players in chat with their friends and then wrapping a soft barrier around larger team communication is a strong nudge.
Your answer about physical sports works because youâre in a small social group that can enforce its own rules. I think that works just as well for online spaces. A community like a forum, like this forum, can self-police its culture. Open platforms canât at scale and suffer the same harassment problems as open multiplayer games. I remember talking to Zombie Studios folks about Blacklight and Hawken and talking about free-to-play multiplayer: in a game where a living community is a necessity, players who donât pay are providing content for players who do. So shouldnât you always want to make it free-to-play? No, they argued, charging a nominal amount ($5-$10) is better simply to weed out trolls. Youâll have vastly less moderation if you require some sort of commitment from players upfront. I think thatâs similar to the required Twitch viewing for Valorant, or required tutorials for other shooters.
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somethingawful forums c. 2004 represent
lol I was with you until this point. I guess physical sports have an advantage in certain respects, but, like⌠lol no.
Obviously almost nobody does it that way. I think itâs recognized as a useful moderation tool that just inflicts too much of a cost to audience size. Blizzard charging for Overwatch is possible because it had a huge marketing and hype push, but in a world flooding with ever more stuff itâs very difficult to raise prices.
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