Hello and welcome to Dominik's Little Old Purple Column the 23rd of its kind. Coming to you from Canada, that little bit of land above America, in more ways than one. Roll the theme tune!
(Apologies to any Americans.)
I haven't done any videogame news for a bit, but this headline leapt out at me this week:
In the future, video games might measure your emotions to deliver the perfect experience (yahoo.com)
It’s about the next generation of Dynamic Game Adjustment. the algorithm that is in certain games these days that will automatically adjust difficulty if you are utter pants like I am. The article is from Yahoo Finance so it's a little dry, with lines like:
“When making any new game, designers are tasked with balancing the difficulty to serve a wide range of players. If you make a game too easy or too difficult, you risk alienating a large subset of the community.”
This is how every single TV programme described videogames before we came along with GamesMaster.
I think Dynamic Game Adjustment is a good thing for players like me, as it is slightly less embarrassing than me having to pause The Last of Us or Horizon Zero Dawn when I get to a tough guy boss or whatever, then moving it down to the EASY setting, so I don't sit there for hours getting angry and then resentful and then regretful and then depressed and then ultimately looking like Malcolm McDowell in the torture scene in A Clockwork Orange. Google that one, kids, you'll be all the better for it!
(PIC Oh no! A hard bit in Horizon Zero Dawn is stressing me out. What ever will I do?)
(PIC: Sorted!)
Alternatively, if you are an MLG (do people still even use the phrase Major League Gamer anymore?) who takes all this stuff seriously, then how are you to know you have truly bested the game with Dynamic Game Adjustment in there? How do you know the AI hasn't gone, “Well he was little bit slow shooting THAT guy, let's drop the difficulty before he goes peepee in his panties”?
And even if you aren't very good at games you may still WANT to have the challenge there. Maybe your life is actually going really well, and you want to feel shit for a change. Who knows?
Anyway, scientists from the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology are working on a way that can factor in your emotions as well as your performance. They did this by drilling deep into the brains of gamers with an adamantium spike while showing them pictures of their Mum looking disappointed.
No, they didn't. Not really. They just got some guys to play games then gave them a questionnaire and assessed four game criteria: challenge, competence, valence, and flow and adjusted stuff and spoke to them and blah blah blah.
I think the first way I suggested was better, to be honest.
I also think this whole thing is bollocks. How can you measure someone's emotional state when they play a game? I sat there playing FIFA Ultimate Team for years in a room surrounded by my family seeming as if I was having a great time when, in fact, I was dying a little bit every day and internally yelping regret at the total waste of time it was. And that yelp of regret will possibly be my death rattle.
If my family couldn’t tell what my emotions were, how the hell could the game?
It couldn’t. It can’t. It never will. I won’t fucking let it.
I don’t want games to know my emotions anyway. That’s all a bit too potentially Skynet for my liking.
And on THAT bombshell - that's your free teaser version of this week's column podcast thing. Tons more in the paid version as usual including a look at an old Amiga game that made me question the nature of God and religion, some news about GamesMaster The Oral History (which will be of particular interest to those of you who have messaged me and/or publicly posted your guttedness at missing the Kickstarter campaign and not ordering a copy) AND my latest attempts to find games that are genuinely relaxing as the world turns to wee and poo. It's over four times the length of this and by being a PAID PAL you support my attempts to keep this going.
CLICK THIS BUTTON BELOW TO DO JUST THAT THEN IF YOU WANT TO
If you can’t or won’t then I hope you join me for next week's free version - until then Keep It Little, Keep it Old, Keep it Purple!
Dominik's Little Old Purple Column #23 FREE VERSION