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Ya, skimping out on world details is usually something that's not fun to attempt to make your own answers for. There can be a bit of a difference between not explaining some part of the world, and just not having it be relevant to the story that's going on. It's rarely questioned that characters in entertainment aren't explicitly shown going to the bathroom or eating every time they'd have to, because you can fill in that it happens off screen. On the other hand, if some plot device shows up out of nowhere, solves everything, and is just treated as a thing the characters already knew about but the audience was never told it's kinda terrible. I think I also went to a different topic a bit. What I'm attempting to say is a world has to be believable, and for that it has to be fleshed out at least to the author. Not every single detail has to be in the story somewhere, but it's good for there to be answers for it and make it feel like something you could guess without just thinking "They probably didn't think of how X worked, or where X is."

The Witness, on a fundamental story level, does feel a lot to me like the Jonathan Blow fucking with people. There was a similar grand reveal at the end of Braid, where it turned out you were the bad guy all along and the princess was a metaphor for nuclear war, or something, and everyone praised how genius it was for doing that. Delaying explaining anything at all until the very end can work, since generally that kind of thing does give you a new perspective on the story if you start over from the beginning and go through it again, but that requires there to be something to look back on. Which The Witness seems to lack. Just saying "Perspectives!" at the end of it doesn't really do anything. A gameplay element of it is having to shift your perspective around to find the environmental puzzles, but that's not a message. There are the different perspectives the author has on what they create means, and what a viewer of it can take away, but that's also nothing new, and the game doesn't seem to do anything novel with the concept. The video at the end of the guy walking around touching circles feels like it's trying to nudge you like "I bet you started connecting lines and circles everywhere if you've played this much huh? Fucked with your perspective I did, aren't I clever"

Heh, I don't mind. It is a really good video.

Ya, it being around for so long gives them a lot of experience to not just fuck it up basically. One of the biggest complaints my friend has with Hearthstone is they constantly make cards that are just absolutely worthless in every single expansion. And not even just like four or five, but like a third of the set is just trash. It was talked about a bit in that video, but Blizzard seems to actively not want to improve their game or the design of it. Instead they just slap a bunch of RNG elements on everything and call it balance.

I'll take a look at those sometime, still watching through some of
Joseph Anderson's stuff.

That concept is kind of the basis of a book I bought awhile back and haven't gotten around to reading yet. It's not copies of the same person all linked together, but multiple people joined together into a hivemind type thing. It seemed interesting, and I should really get around to reading it at some point. But ya, the idea of what a consciousness is exactly, and what really defines a person, is something I generally really like when stories explore. It's one of those things we really don't have a definitive answer to yet, and don't seem to be close to. The idea of transhumanism is something I also enjoy being explored in stories a lot, and it tends to have parts of that.

Ya, pure exploration for the sake of exploration can be fun too, but there also has to be things of interest there. It also helps a lot if the environments are really nice to look at.

I watched through Joseph Anderson's video on Fallout 4 a bit after I sent that, and saw he made the same point. I didn't know about the quest with the kid locked in a refrigerator for 200 years, who miraculously survived the whole time without ever being noticed but then also had his parents turn into ghouls living across the street from him. That kind of stuff just implies they really didn't give a shit about how long 200 years is, or only used it to distance themselves from Fallout 1&2 and treat it like they're a decade or two after the bombs dropped at most.

One thing that I did in my playthrough that he also did was gun down Father the moment he walked into the room; he didn't mention it, but after you do that if you look at your quest in your pipboy the game says something like "I refused Shawn's offer to join the institute and now I must leave." And that's how I found out Shawn was Father, after I shot him in the fucking face the moment I saw him and was never informed of this. Bethesda apparently didn't comprehend the player shooting him in the fucking face the moment he walked into the room, and didn't even include that in the writing for the quest.

The whole thing with the endings all basically being the same thing was something I didn't know about either. I sided with the railroad on my playthrough, and was hoping to attempt to make Father see compassion for the synths and let them go free, because as I talked about above I find the idea of what makes a person super interesting and an advanced AI that's indistinguishable from a person is a huge "What the fuck do we do with these now" kind of thing, and my general opinion on that is if they think they're a person then they're a person. That was a tangent, but ya, I was really disappointed that you can't do fucking anything at all to make Father change his mind, or even just play along until you're the head of the institute and then say "Synth's are free, deal with it." Instead you blow it all up, cus reasons. I also completely forgot about the synth-shawn that Father pawns off on you at the end of the game because... he changed his mind I guess? I never got the note from him about that part because immediately after the ending of the game I turned it off in disappointment.

I also didn't connect the idea that Fallout 4 was a bad attempt at Bethesda imitating what Obsidian did with New Vegas's faction based storyline. Except it's a whole lot less thought out and not handled well.



[](/scratchampton "We started pretty much right after that game ended, ya. Man time goes fast.")Wow, huh. Guess it has been five years.

Yup. It's a little hard to see in the pictures, but the whole button surface tilts significantly to the right, which tweaks my wrist just enough to make it very, very sore after a few days of use. This from someone who's spent lots and lots of time in front of a computers for over a decade and never suffered anything even close to real ergonomic pain before.

It's a real pity too, because I love the mouse otherwise. Cheap, looks ok, and it has Logitech's "Hyper Fast" scrolling, basically free-wheeling which is fantastic for certain programs or web pages. Doesn't work well for other things, but you can toggle it on and off. But this issue means it's useless to me now. $30 down the drain.