I Don’t Know How To Play Video Games

I Don’t Know How To Play Video Games, But Here’s What I Thought Of ‘Detroit: Become Human’

by Mikaela MaxwellJune 21, 2018

I almost don’t even know where to start. Almost.

I’ll start by saying I have not been able to stop talking about Detroit: Become Human. Anyone who will listen, or anyone who doesn’t know what’s coming and simply gets sucked into it (sorry Mom) is hearing me talk about this game. Even before I started playing the game, I was talking about this game…

At least you’re reading this and can decide to check out at any time, but if you want to get at me to talk about it, I’m super interested in hearing what other people have to say about it too! If you’re considering playing it, just STOP reading right now and go get in there, you won’t regret it – or maybe you will, but I’m not your boss, do what you want!

I hope you’re feeling like a princess, because you’re about to get SPOILED. (I was feeling pretty clever when I wrote that). Seriously though, last warning.

Detroit came into my life a year or two ago when Derek (my long-time fiancé and long-time Geekscapist) excitedly showed me a trailer for it. Immediately I was intrigued – it looked absolutely beautiful, and the little taste of story we saw in the trailer seemed so interesting. Then, time moved on and it was totally forgotten until a month or so ago when the game’s free demo came out. Derek had played through it a couple of times and encouraged me to give it a try aswell.

Immediately, starting the demo I was frustrated. It has taken me so long to finally feel like I can kinda use the sticks (you know the ones on the controller that probably have an actual name) to play a game, and here this game decides to use totally different mechanics and I am right back to getting stuck in a corner staring at the wall… seriously. That being said, I got used to it pretty quickly and was able to enjoy the gameplay of the demo, especially with my side-kick sitting beside me patiently (so patiently) explaining how to interpret the symbols and reminding me how to use the controls in this new setting. Once I adapted to the camera angles and flow of the moving mechanisms, I was actually able to sit back and enjoy the cinematic feel of the game as the story unfolded. Between the two of us we each played the demo twice, and without any strategy, got 4 totally different outcomes. Cue more intrigue.

I don’t know the actual amount of time, but pretty quickly after playing the demo Derek was digging into the full game. He was super hyped about it from the moment he saw that original trailer (saying something about enjoying the company’s previous games), and that excitement was only amped up with each new little tidbit of information, so by game time, he was pretty stoked to get in there. I, on the other hand, was interested enough to catch 10 minutes here and there of his gameplay, without any real intention of playing myself. It definitely seemed like an interesting premise, but who has time to play a whole game? Turns out the answer is me, and probably me again.

It was pretty neat seeing so many recognizable actors in a game.

I somehow managed to catch the final ten minutes of Derek’s playthrough, which was totes cool, cause you want all the spoilers when you’re never gonna play the game but are interested in the story. Little did I know by the next day I would be carefully arranging my afternoon so I had multiple hours to devote to uncovering my own version of this game’s story.

After finishing his playthrough, Derek filled me in a bit on what it was about, and we got into talking about the possibilities of what the future could hold for man and their machines.

Basically, the story is set in 2038, in Detroit obviously. Humans have created Androids, which are essentially robots that look exactly like humans, and are using them to do all of the dirty work (well actually all of the work in general). Androids are used for housekeeping, child rearing, manual labour, security guards, sex workers, personal assistants, military, etc. etc.; this has all been great for the economy blah blah blah… BUT THEN the Androids start to wake up. The Androids are becoming sentient beings, and now there is a whole other kettle of fish to boil! The Androids realize that they are basically slaves, and slowly more and more are becoming ‘deviant’ (self-aware) and are wanting their freedom, and a right to live the life they choose with the people they choose. Just like humans, once self-aware, Androids vary greatly, all with different personalities, priorities, opinions, etc..

The thought of this is terrifying to me personally. Don’t get me wrong, I welcome technology into my life – I am surrounded by Alexa and Siri (who I just asked to define sentient for me, don’t worry we are using it correctly), and my phone is permanently attached to my person. However, I have no desire for Alexa to take human form and strive for her own goals and dreams. No. Thank. You. I’m pretty sure every science fiction movie has it right when they predict that robots will eventually figure out that humans suck and the planet would be better off without us, as would the robots, then BAM we are made extinct. Nope nope nope. How about lets just avoid getting to that place altogether and not make super smarter than us robots, and then we don’t have to worry about Android rights at all?! How about that?

Anyway, so after a lengthy discussion about ethics and morality around the creation/use/control/freedom of hypothetical Androids, I thought to myself if I can literally think and talk about this so extensively, why wouldn’t I want to give this crazy game a go?! So I jumped in there!

I have definitely never played a game quite like this before. You play from the perspective of three different Androids (Kara, Markus, and Connor), and gameplay is broken up into chapters that alternate between the characters, allowing you to follow and develop their storylines simultaneously. The curious beauty of the whole thing is that you really are developing their stories, as every choice you make has an impact on future choices and outcomes throughout their personal journey, thus shaping the overall story of the entire game.

Although each character is an Android, they are all coming from different backgrounds and are facing different challenges:

Kara is a housekeeping/child-rearing Android, who is owned by a drug addict and required to take care of his kid, until she realizes that he has been beating both of them and decides to escape his cruelty and take little Alice with her.

Markus is owned by a kind old man who encourages him to explore the arts and treats him with respect, until the old man dies. Markus is torn apart and has to find himself a new home, while also realizing he is a person, and taking on the task of fighting for Android rights.

Connor is a special investigative Android who has been sent by Cyberlife (the Android making company) to help Lieutenant Hank track down deviants (sentient Androids) and figure out why Androids are becoming deviant in the first place.

Now going into this, knowing how apprehensive I am about artificial intelligence/robots, one may think that I would be all about killing the Androids so they don’t take over the whole dang world… But actually, since we are playing as Androids I was fully on team Android and wanted to do everything I could to make each of these characters successful in achieving what I perceived to be their goals. However, like real life, sometimes things get a little muddy and it is hard to know what the right thing to do is, so you use all of the information available to you and your judgement and try your best. Sometimes this works out and is helpful, sometimes you totally fuck up the very goal you were trying to accomplish.

Some of the biggest take-aways I got from this game were: I am a people pleaser and I struggle desperately with FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).

I went through most of the game trying to find a way to please everyone around each character, which is particularly difficult when all the characters around you are specifically meant to be on opposing sides of every argument and you have to choose between them, inevitably building trust and friendship with some people, and making others absolutely hate you. This was particularly difficult with Markus and Connor – I wanted Lieutenant Hank to like Connor, but not at the expense of reaching Connor’s goal, and Hank is particularly hard to read so it was difficult to know what would end up being the wrong thing to say! Markus on the other hand had the option to be pacifist or violent, so I leaned toward pacifist, which was great with the exception of the fact that his potential love interest was a violent person, and I desperately wanted to have them love each other (or at least not be hostile) but not at the expense of starting war with the humans. Such conundrums!

I really like the way the game is set up to guide you through the story. I played on the easier mode, and am not totally sure what the other mode would have been like, but in the mode I played there were many little tags showing you what you could interact with, and drawing your attention to things that were important to look at. It also literally showed you which button you needed to press and how you needed to press it every time you were required to do something other than walk. In this way it really took on a cinematic, choose your own adventure feel, as it didn’t require so much skill, but more engagement to choose how the story plays out. This can be kinda irritating when it feels like you are literally just pushing a button every once in a while so that the game isn’t just one long cut scene. Sometimes I found myself wishing it was just a show I could watch so I could get the story without the stress and time of being involved. But mostly I was super into it, and really enjoyed watching the story unfold as I prompted it along.

Every chapter has multiple points in which you are required to make choices, either by choosing an action or choosing who to talk to, or what to say, or how to handle a situation. Now I’m sure this isn’t a new concept, but it was certainly new to me. Not that I’ve never made a choice in a video game before, but I have never been so keenly aware of the impact my choices are making. Every chapter has a flowchart associated with it, and this flowchart shows you where you’ve made choices and how that choices leads to another action/choice/scenario, and so on. This flow chart not only shows you what you have chosen, but also shows you the blank paths that you could have gone down without giving you any indication of what that path would have meant. HOLY EFF what an EFFECTIVE way to get you engaged in a game.

This immediately kicked in my FOMO. At the end of the first chapter I took a good look at the flowchart and was immediately fascinated and horrified. There were so many things that were apparently right in front of me that I hadn’t seen/looked at/talked to. Which meant that some paths were cut off to me without me even being aware. Later on you discover that so many of your decisions impact what options are open to you and what path you are on in future chapters, and unless you unlocked that path, you NEVER know what you missed that stopped you from having these options in the future. What a mindfuck! The beauty of this whole scheme is that when you are playing you are never aware that you are missing anything or that it is possible for the story to have gone any other way!

Once, when playing as Connor I was chasing these two Androids and trying to stop them from escaping so that I could get more information from them. But they attacked me and Hank, and in the end I had to make a split second decision to shoot one of them or let her get away. My feeling at the time was that this person was a danger and I was unsure what the consequences of her getting away would be to Connors end goal, so I shot her. Weeeeeell, this happened to be a moment when Derek walked into the room, only to be horrified at my decision making. It turns out that when playing he had let her go and then she had become helpful (after telling some SOB story about being in love), meanwhile I just straight up killed her and then her lover killed herself too and I was at a dead-end. If Derek hadn’t have rolled in I would have thought this seemed like the only reasonable option in the fast-paced-moment. And I am sure that the split second decision there had impacts on Connor’s outcomes later on down the road. This is just a small example of the decision making and repercussions, and the things is, this shit happens throughout the whole damn game!

A lot of the time I feel like like I’m choosing based on my instinct and how I think I want it to play out. Sometimes that’s a guessing game and it doesn’t work out at all, but it would be so uncomfortable to go totally against my people-pleasing-trying-to-be-the-good-guy ways. Sometimes I am just genuinely getting messed up, because why does Playstation have to have symbols on their buttons instead of letters like everyone else?!?! Just WHY?? Like I appreciate you telling me its time to hit the square button, but where the eff is the square button, oh just kidding someone’s dead already. And sometimes when you have to choose fast there is just so much pressure and then you can’t go back and change your mind, and your stuck on this danged path you stumbled into.

It must have been so much work to make this game. The graphics are beautiful, especially that handsome Markus (Grey’s Anatomy guy aka Jesse Williams) with his different coloured eyes! Though sometimes I felt like things were a little unrealistic looking, I think I’m just getting spoiled as I never played games in the old days when Lara Croft had triangle boobs. Also, they would have had to do the story writing and animations for so freaking many combinations of story outcomes. So. Freaking. Many. How can a game be so vastly different in so many ways!? I can’t even imagine how many actors recorded so many lines of dialog that most players will never even hear. I feel like I literally played an entirely different game than Derek did, and I can’t wait to hear how the story played out for some of the other Geekscapists!

In the end… I failed miserably.

I had watched the moments of glory when Derek’s Androids were lead to victory at the end of his story. Meanwhile in the last ten minutes of my game literally all of my main characters were killed and the humans obliterated the Androids with hardly any resistance.

Of course, I have gone back to the middle of the game and am trying to make different choices to get a different (and less bleak) outcome. **Fingers Crossed**

Like I said, I love talking about Detroit: Become Human. I love talking about it so much that I’ll be joining in on a special Geekscape Games discussion about the title and what all of the hosts thought of it, so be sure to look for that in the coming days!

I Don’t Know How To Play Video Games, But Here’s What I Thought Of ‘Super Mario Odyssey’

by Mikaela MaxwellNovember 7, 2017

Geekscape has been a part of my life for about three years now (as has my Fiancé Derek). Turns out that Derek comes with Geekscape, and Geekscape comes with Derek, and the two are pretty much inseparable.

It’s been pretty neat watching Derek be a part of this community that shares so many interests – interests in topics that were for the most part so (sooooo) foreign to me. Through Derek I have learned a lot (and then learned again and again and again when I forget and ask for the millionth time) about a lot of these things.

Derek and this site have opened a door to a whole range of ideas that are so intricate and involved; I really do feel like I am learning about a whole new culture when trying to understand the ins and outs of this ‘Geek culture’. I still feel like I am just scratching the surface of understanding things like role playing games, graphic novels, comic books, superheroes, anime, and of course video games (just to name a few). That being said, I’ve also discovered that I quite enjoy most of this stuff!

And so here we are – I’m writing, and you’re reading, about my experience playing a video game. Who would have ever thought this would be a thing!?

In my head, it seems like everybody’s first video game memory should be of something Mario related… in truth mine is not. Now I could be totally mixing things up, but if Mortal Kombat on Sega Genesis is a thing that existed, it’s definitely my first video game memory. I definitely remember sitting in my Dad’s living room button mashing the shit outta the controller and, according to these rose coloured memories, annihilating the competition using one of those wicked lady fighters as my weapon of choice. I also favoured Duck Hunt in my youth… and continue to long for its return all these years later (but unfortunately don’t have a TV that it would work on). Later in my teen years, my Mom’s house became equipped with a new-to-us N64 and a few games, including Diddy Kong racing, which quickly became a family favourite. That pretty much sums up my video game experience during the Pre-Derek Era.

https://youtu.be/GcoTSYSuoO0

The other day I started playing Super Mario Odyssey on the Nintendo Switch, and I was pretty much instantly hooked! As a person who didn’t really embrace video games until much later in life it can sometimes be super difficult and overwhelming to get into a new game. This has not been the case with Super Mario Odyssey… except that it was literally difficult because I couldn’t exactly remember how to go about getting into a game on the Switch, or how to get into the game under my own profile (Derek, unwittingly, narrowly escaped me ruining his gamer cred by assuming his Mario identity). Luckily for him, through patience, perseverance, and a fair bit of swearing, I finally entered into the realm of Super Mario Odyssey.

One of the things that I really liked about this game is it doesn’t overwhelm you with controls. You start in a place (a level I guess… maybe a world!?) that does a good job of holding your hand through learning approximately five basic controls. Some of it is intuitive, and mostly it becomes intuitive pretty quickly, but at no point is it overwhelming to remember how to function on a basic level. It seems also that as you move through the game, and through the levels or worlds, you are kind of taught what you need to know as you need to know it. This was re-emphasized to me when I got to a more challenging area of the game and died like 10 times before deciding I should just move on to a different area, where I then learned the skills and acquire the equipment I needed to be able to complete the previously murderous task without difficulty.

That being said, I have become very grateful for the ‘Action Guide’ menu option (when I remember it’s there). As much as I appreciate the simplicity of the basic movements and my ability to function with that as my baseline, I still have a lot of difficulty remembering what the more advanced functions are. I’m sure that if I were to play multiple hours a day, many days in a row, it would be a lot easier to remember how to, for example, roll, which would make getting around so much faster.

In any case, that is not my life story, and as with most games, when I go back to playing I rely heavily on this type of menu to remind me of all the other magical things I am capable of in this world! I’m hoping that as I play this game more I will actually be able to remember some of these moves, and until then I will definitely remember how to get to that Action Guide (which is actually really straight forward, yay!).

I’m not sure what the proper term is, but I tend to struggle with games where I have to use two separate sticks to look and to move at the same time. In other games this has led to a lot of getting stuck in corners and shooting the ground while enemies kill me quickly. This is another point in the win column for this game –not only is the pace totally dictated by me, but when I’m trying to figure out how to move straight enough to get from point A to point B Mario spreads his arms out and looks like a dizzy little kid trying to fly and it’s basically the cutest. It’s also super helpful that randomly swinging the Joy Cons around makes you throw your hat, because when I am being attacked by anything swatting my hands while trying to run away is a pretty automatic (and somewhat effective) reaction!

As a not-quite-gamer I appreciate the non-pressure of knowing that I can set the pace without any negative repercussions in this game. That being said, as a not-quite-gamer when I am struggling to remember/figure out how to function/not die, everything takes For. Fucking. Ever. I cannot wait util the day where I can easily and quickly get through at least the simple tasks of this/any video game without my character failing 40 times first! (except for Stardew Valley, I got that on lock already)!

I often will also struggle with nausea due to motion sickness in games where I am having to use both sticks to move and look, mostly because my character is wandering around like a drunken sailor and so I end up feeling like one. As I have put more hours into this game I am starting to notice the sea sickness, but this is another area where I am hoping practice will make perfect and hopefully I will be able to rectify the nausea while also becoming more efficient at not falling of ledges or running into things.

Moving around as Mario is one thing, but you also get to throw your hat onto different characters or objects and become them for a period of time. This is a great mechanic, which I am really enjoying when I remember to clue into using it. So far, my favourite was stomping around as a big ol’ T-Rex, though that flying Bullet Bill guy was pretty fun too. I can’t wait to figure out how to become the bird that flies just out of reach in the desert world; it’s loud, and sparkly, and seems to go anywhere, basically it seems like the ultimate do everything character to takeover (I’m casually going to pretend I didn’t spend a solid 5 minutes bouncing hopelessly on a flower waiting for, then failing to catch the bird, and not even realizing until way later that the flower throws you way higher if you actually open it before bouncing…)

I also became a cactus at one point, but could not for the life of me figure out what I was supposed to do while cactusing.

One thing I have come to love about video games is the incredible variation of beautiful art in so many different art styles, and Super Mario Odyssey did not disappoint in this category! The worlds that you are immersed in are breathtaking, and all of them are different, with different types of creatures and layouts to explore. The place where I am right now is a desert that’s been frozen, so there are all these neat Frozen crystals throughout the landscape (super pretty). Inversely, the previous world was full of lush grass and a giant water fall with dinosaurs and vicious ball-and-chains (of the not spousal variety). I am super looking forward to seeing what the next worlds have in store!

It’s always interesting for me to play a game, and then to watch Derek play the same game. It’s crazy how we can be playing the same title but end up playing totally different games. On a basic level, he has way more experience using the various video game moving around mechanics, and so that part he just doesn’t have to think about. So, in a place where it takes me a full minute to creep around an edge and collect coins without falling off, he has scooped those coins in all of 10 seconds! But also, once he got through the first real open playing area and had reached the goal (collecting enough moons to power a ship) that allowed you to move on, where I had launched on to the next world, he took the opportunity to go back and keep exploring. This is when we discovered Super Mario Odyssey has soooo many hidden treasures to be found and goals to be accomplished! After completing the main task of that world/level we discovered new paths and entrances to secret tunnels, as well as new characters to interact with, and just so many more things to do. In a world where I was stoked to have collected 5 moons when only 4 were required, Derek discovered there was actually potential for 25 moons to be obtained! What this tells me is that Nintendo was really thinking ahead, and delivering a quality product to all of its customers; not only is this game totally accessible to young or new gamers, but it is also super rewarding for people who like more of a challenge to their games!

To sum it all up, I am totally digging this game. Like so many other interests, I feel like I have just scratched the surface of it, and I am super looking forward to digging deeper. I want all of the moons. All of them. I am also super looking forward to dying less.

A helpful tip for anyone getting into this great game: Purple water is not water. Do not try to swim in it. You will die. Every time. Immediately.

Keep an eye out for more from me, If I ever manage to stop playing this game, maybe I’ll write a bit about my next new (or new to me) game experience!

https://youtu.be/g4xW9aCg2zY