- “How extraordinarily interesting one could make the story, if one were to going to die the day before it was published.”
– William Morris
Commonplace Book
Dominoes (Art & Entertainment)
Great Player Characters of History
Shorthand (Design Theory & Criticism)
8/27/2024
Dread Designs: the Dice Mechanics of HALFLIGHT
Shorthand
I write this essay from one of the few air-conditioned hotel rooms I can afford in a sweltering coastal city whose primary language I consider myself cringingly ill-equipped to converse in. I’m alone on a working vacation, and in between client meetings, lunches at the nearby Turkish restaurant, and dinners at the nearby Swahili restaurant, I’ve found myself with an abundance of time and a shortage of interesting ways to pass it. And so I return to a form of entertainment done by many and done well by few: the Let’s Play.
Namely, Beaglerush’s XCOM: Ironman Impossible and the No One Can Know About This Final Fantasy VII LPs, which share one commonality: they’re both done by recording the game first, and talking over it later. The NOCKAT boys go a step further by recording themselves playing the game and commenting on it in real-time, and then watching it again together and doing a sort of “Director’s Commentary” on the series. It’s wildly entertaining, even through the audio-only medium of apodcast, though I admit that my familiarity with the game has allowed me to create a mental image of the scenes and areas as they encounter them.
My aversion to most LPs is simply that they’re boring and take too long. This is a problem that extends to the LPs tabletop counterpart, the Actual Play: so named because listening to one makes you realize that you’d rather actually be playing. While I understand why most creators of LPs and APs refuse to edit their work — it’s time-consuming, audio / video editing is a skill, and upload schedule are often tight) — this leads to the creation of three-hour videos that often contain one hour of engaging content. What takes up the lion’s share of the runtime? Deliberation, repetitive encounters, and other chaff.
Perhaps I’m in the minority, because the success of twitch.tv shows that there is clearly a market for watching people play through games live and with minimal interruption, random battles and all. I fail to see the appeal of this. I’m a StealthGamerBR fan, : when I watch someone play a game, I either want them to be so spectacularly competent as to make a mockery of its systems, or so charmingly entertaining that watching them fail is a sport in itself.
1 Buchanan, Kate. “How Dice Changed in the Middle Ages.” Medievalist. https://www.medievalists.net/2018/02/dice-changed-middle-ages/.
2 Hedges, Stephen A. “Dice Music in the Eighteenth Century.” Music & Letters 59, no. 2 (1978): 180–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/734136.