amberautumnfaebrooke

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

when you're mean to me, this is who you're being mean to [posts an extremely neutral, flatly lit photograph of myself]

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

the knock causes the INTERCOM to sound like GUNFIRE.

SUE dives to the ground.

"oh god, they've found me, i'm outta time, you gotta help me, please!"

you look down at your disheveled pajamas. what do you look like?

DESCRIBE YOUR CHARACTER NOW. don't forget to include a name!

>

CYBER HEIST --- an ADVENTURE GAME

tip: input COMMANDS using the REBLOG function

---

it is NIGHT, about 2 o' clock, very little TRAFFIC. you live in a broken down APARTMENT in CYBERTOPOLIS, a dystopian futuristic hellhole where all crime has been made illegal. you're sitting in your LIVING ROOM with your pet cat GARMEADOW (you would have named him garfield but copyright infringement is illegal in CYBERTOPOLIS), thinking about all the cool things you would do if it were allowed, when there's a knock on your DOOR.

a moment later, the INTERCOM sounds.

"hello, are you there?"

you recognize the voice of your friend, SUE SPICIOUS.

>

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

CYBER HEIST --- an ADVENTURE GAME

tip: input COMMANDS using the REBLOG function

---

it is NIGHT, about 2 o' clock, very little TRAFFIC. you live in a broken down APARTMENT in CYBERTOPOLIS, a dystopian futuristic hellhole where all crime has been made illegal. you're sitting in your LIVING ROOM with your pet cat GARMEADOW (you would have named him garfield but copyright infringement is illegal in CYBERTOPOLIS), thinking about all the cool things you would do if it were allowed, when there's a knock on your DOOR.

a moment later, the INTERCOM sounds.

"hello, are you there?"

you recognize the voice of your friend, SUE SPICIOUS.

>

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

i love when ttrpgs/story games tell you what's going to happen later so you can build in dramatic irony. a couple years back i played this game where it was clear pretty early that eventually in one of the scripted time-skips that my character was going to sleep with her best friend's husband, so i made a point of mentioning in every scene that i don't date, i don't ever date

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

the zydrate does WHAT in a little glass vial?????????

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

it's frankly unconscionable i haven't yet been targeted by a vampire coven

#basically the rule is you can reblog if your blog isn't just porn and pictures of trans women

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

this one is my favorite reply to this post so far.

i've gotten a lot of replies saying things like "they design the arenas before they find out who the contestants are" (guys, this is one of the best-funded entertainment programs in the world, they have a large team of professionals working on this thing, and we see them modify the arena on the fly repeatedly during the games, i don't for one second believe you couldn't modify the games during tech week) and an ENORMOUS number of replies saying essentially "they don't actually want to humanize the contestants."

to which i would say: what? yes they do. they obviously do. what are you talking about?

we can debate whether it's smart or useful for them to do that, but it's clearly what they're doing. they designed a sponsor system into the games which, sure, makes them money, but also obviously has the design effect of strongly incentivizing the contestants to play into their narratives for the crowd. like you say above, all the mentors are encouraging the contestants to play up their stories for sponsor help, this is a decades-long practice, it's a known quantity, they're hardly shying away from it. they built this rules system, they know how it works, it's encouraging public personalization on purpose.

and i mean let's talk caesar flickerman, who sort of stands in in these stories for the whole process of building narratives for these kids. he's a charismatic guy and apparently the main lens through which the capital presents the contestants to the world, and his whole job appears to be to ask them questions to get them to talk about their stories, and to make them look likeable, sympathetic. the capital didn't have to give the kids any media attention, it could have been just a set of games of random children, but they choose every year to get the public invested in this specific group of characters, because it makes the games more exciting. and yeah, the other part of caesar's job is to keep the tone light so it doesn't feel like anyone is watching a murder farm. it feels, like the above poster said, like they're watching a sports event.

this is a point i really love in the above post that i don't think contradicts my original thesis at all. the capital wants people to think of tributes as game pieces, which they do by building up these very arch, melodramatic narratives about them, and which they could support by incorporating those narratives into the arena. the wedding chapel still works in this model.

another thing i love about this reply is the point that the 75th games were an exception, that they had a different design goal but needed to look like they were business as usual. this isn't something i've seen a lot of people saying but i'm actually very ready to concede that point! i don't think it excuses them not telling the contestants the mechanics of the arena, if anything i would argue it only exacerbates that problem, but in terms of the personalization, yeah, ok, maybe the 75th games specifically WOULDN'T have benefited from the wedding chapel, point well made.

my other favorite reply is all the people saying they're obsessed with my jokerfied mind. mwah, i am giving you each a delicate kiss on the forehead.

i think i could design a better death arena for children than those hunger games amateurs.

the whole premise of the games is all pageantry. every year you get a crop of 24 candidates around whom the entire state media apparatus dedicates an entire year to building celebrity narratives. this candidate is the younger sibling of last year's winner - these candidates are young lovers forced to compete - he's smart - she's fast - root for them, care about them, watch them, form opinions on them, bet on them. and then they stick them all in an arena to kill each other, which is a great entertainment premise, except that they make the arenas themselves really boring and generic. ooo, they're in...a forest.

it's not even an interestingly designed forest. imagine if the game designers treated their arena like an actual video game designer treats level design. discrete zones with multiple paths between each room, creative use of lighting to guide players to points of interest, points of interest scattered across the map, discoverable resources hidden to encourage exploration. instead they just have a generic outdoors location and if you get too close to the edge they throw a random fireball at you.

the 75th games are especially bad about this. the arena is laid out radially into 12 wedges, and each hour one wedge becomes especially dangerous in a 12-hour loop. as a mechanic, this is genius. it forces everyone to keep moving, making "survival by hiding" an engaging and tense viewing experience instead of someone sitting in a tree for three days. plus, it encourages players to return to the center of the arena, where travel time between wedges is short, which creates a high-value zone for players to regularly return to and conflict over. in other words, it's a mechanic which incentives players to adopt dramatic, dynamic, exciting behaviors which are entertaining to watch (not to mention it communicates geography to the audience well). but it only incentives those behaviors if the players understand what's happening, and they go out of their way not to tell the players anything! when they figure out what's going on, the showrunners spin the arena to disorient the players, like they're intentionally trying to get them to just. randomly wander the jungle instead.

this isn't even to mention how often they create undramatic, boring deaths. they plant poison berries around the arena. they supply no fresh water and no way to get it. they roll poison clouds over sleeping victims. these happen to work out in the books themselves but you have to imagine that extremely often these just result in players dying unexciting deaths.

the cardinal sin though, of course, is that nothing is done to personalize the arena for the crop of contestants that year. if i'm designing the 75th hunger games and two of my most beloved contestants famously had to cancel their wedding because of a return to the games, i would OBVIOUSLY give them a trail of, i don't know, wild game which conveniently leads directly past a well defended wedding chapel. will they hole up there for a while? hold a mock ceremony for themselves? do or receive ironic violence here? stare wistfully and move on? any of it is better television than getting attacked by generic attack monkeys. you should have a dozen of these things on the map for every single candidate. but the game makers are more interested in doing the same thing every other game has done than in telling a compelling story.

it makes me second guess enjoying the children's murder arenas at all.

#the hunger games #thg

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

idk you guys i think you may just not have a full grasp of the complexities of getting audiences to watch movies

i have seen a lot of posts reading some variation on "studios are going to learn from barbenheimer to release two DIFFERENT movies concurrently when they should be learning to release two GOOD movies," a take i find absolutely infuriating. like, just to begin with, people don't often... choose to make bad movies. movies are really really hard to make, and it's famously impossible to know whether anyone will like the damn thing until it's already basically done. if you're a studio exec and you're planning your slate for next year, do you go with the weird experimental movie made by an up-and-coming with few-to-no features under their belt? sometimes you end up with a gem, but at least as often it flops and ends up costing you a bunch of money. what about established directors who regularly give you good stuff? sometimes nolan will give you his most well-received work since the batman stuff, and sometimes olivia wilde will turn in don't worry darling and audiences will turn their noses up. "make good movies" is not actionable advice.

not that being a good movie is actually any guarantee people will see it. in my opinion, the best movie released so far this year is past lives, and i'm not alone in that. the reviews are unanimously glowing, the letterboxd for it is basically all overwhelming praise. and that movie made barely 10mil. how much have you heard anyone talking about that movie? how many people do you know who've seen it? it wasn't an especially limited release, it's probably still showing at your local amc.

now how many people do you know who have seen the dungeons and dragons movie?

that's not a dig on the d&d movie, i like the d&d movie! i'm just saying, the truth is, there are few sure bets in this business. the success of a movie is a combination of its quality, its marketing, pure dumb luck, and yes, i'm sorry, star power and brand recognition.

we've all seen and made a thousand posts about how hollywood has no new ideas. complaining about reboots and sequels has been a stale observation for decades. but i also haven't seen the "no sequels or reboots" crowd get as excited any anything this year as they have about across the spider-verse and barbie. two excellent movies! which, be really honest with yourself, you would have been less likely to have seen if you weren't already excited about the property! barbenheimer isn't just two good movies. it's two good movies audience members already have reference points for.

i think this is a really human reaction. there is so much media at this point in history, constantly competing for your attention, and you can't possibly pay attention to it. so, as a heuristic, you look for reference points. i don't pay attention to AAA video games in general, but you bet your ass that when they announce the last of us part 3 i'm going to take notice, because i connected so strongly with the second one, but if they released basically the same game with a different name i might not ever hear about it.

there's that post where craig mccraken says he pitched cartoon network like seventeen original shows and they rejected everything until he suggested a powerpuff girls reboot, and everyone went "wow, the horrible studio execs are stifling creativity," and i just... i mean, are you really convinced you would watch those original shows? that your cousins would? that caitlin, a 32 year old single mom in michigan would put that on for her kids?

this isn't me saying "i don't care if movies are good" or "i'm glad they make so many sequels and reboots." this is me saying "you are not immune to branding" and "audiences have some share of responsibility for how things are" and "find a way to seek out media you're less familiar with."

i do that by seeing a movie in theaters once a week, but you can do it by giving yourself themed prompts when deciding what to watch, picking an album of the week, joining a book or movie club, or just asking friends for recommendations.

there is so so much out there that is exactly up your alley, that is weird and different and fresh, but the niche stuff won't come to you. you have to find it.

#barbie #oppenheimer #barbenheimer #past lives

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

i wish you could teach spotify's algorithm to distinguish between your real music taste and shit you just listened to as like, a bit. like nooooo spotify, you don't understand, i only listened to all those caramelldansen remixes because it's a good song that i enjoy

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

i don't need twitter for posts. comedy is in the natural world all around us. once a month kaiser sends me a bottle of estradiol with a printed warning not to use it if i become pregnant.

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

i watch a normal amount of movies. if any of you guys watch a different amount of movies than me then frankly you're being the weird ones.

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

i think i could design a better death arena for children than those hunger games amateurs.

the whole premise of the games is all pageantry. every year you get a crop of 24 candidates around whom the entire state media apparatus dedicates an entire year to building celebrity narratives. this candidate is the younger sibling of last year's winner - these candidates are young lovers forced to compete - he's smart - she's fast - root for them, care about them, watch them, form opinions on them, bet on them. and then they stick them all in an arena to kill each other, which is a great entertainment premise, except that they make the arenas themselves really boring and generic. ooo, they're in...a forest.

it's not even an interestingly designed forest. imagine if the game designers treated their arena like an actual video game designer treats level design. discrete zones with multiple paths between each room, creative use of lighting to guide players to points of interest, points of interest scattered across the map, discoverable resources hidden to encourage exploration. instead they just have a generic outdoors location and if you get too close to the edge they throw a random fireball at you.

the 75th games are especially bad about this. the arena is laid out radially into 12 wedges, and each hour one wedge becomes especially dangerous in a 12-hour loop. as a mechanic, this is genius. it forces everyone to keep moving, making "survival by hiding" an engaging and tense viewing experience instead of someone sitting in a tree for three days. plus, it encourages players to return to the center of the arena, where travel time between wedges is short, which creates a high-value zone for players to regularly return to and conflict over. in other words, it's a mechanic which incentives players to adopt dramatic, dynamic, exciting behaviors which are entertaining to watch (not to mention it communicates geography to the audience well). but it only incentives those behaviors if the players understand what's happening, and they go out of their way not to tell the players anything! when they figure out what's going on, the showrunners spin the arena to disorient the players, like they're intentionally trying to get them to just. randomly wander the jungle instead.

this isn't even to mention how often they create undramatic, boring deaths. they plant poison berries around the arena. they supply no fresh water and no way to get it. they roll poison clouds over sleeping victims. these happen to work out in the books themselves but you have to imagine that extremely often these just result in players dying unexciting deaths.

the cardinal sin though, of course, is that nothing is done to personalize the arena for the crop of contestants that year. if i'm designing the 75th hunger games and two of my most beloved contestants famously had to cancel their wedding because of a return to the games, i would OBVIOUSLY give them a trail of, i don't know, wild game which conveniently leads directly past a well defended wedding chapel. will they hole up there for a while? hold a mock ceremony for themselves? do or receive ironic violence here? stare wistfully and move on? any of it is better television than getting attacked by generic attack monkeys. you should have a dozen of these things on the map for every single candidate. but the game makers are more interested in doing the same thing every other game has done than in telling a compelling story.

it makes me second guess enjoying the children's murder arenas at all.

#the hunger games #game design

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

this is my first post on this site.