From the Aether #3
Originally posted November 7, 2019
Howdy partners! As we move past Spooky SZN 2k19, we find ourselves marching towards the end of the year. This, for us, is a big deal as 2019 is the first year in which Into the Aether has existed for a full 365 days. It has seen us playing more games than we both thought possible, and as such has also found us thinking about them in new ways. Our pieces below reflect that.
We want to, as usual, thank all of you who support the show in any way. The existence of this newsletter feels more like a gift to us than anything else. Here’s to #3.
Brendon + Stephen
Eating & Drinking With Friends In Space
by Stephen Hilger
I’ve been running a DND campaign with a close group of friends for three years, and while we have battled dragons, feral wolf spirits in the feywild, and sailed the majority of this fictional world we have built together, the reason they keep coming back is the emotional investment they have put into the characters. More specifically: the NPCs.
As the one running the game, I love hearing this from the group. I put a lot of work into the NPCs, but I also leave it to the moment to see who will be interacted with. Entire backstories have been tossed aside as the group ignores the character I thought was interesting for the weird alchemist shopkeeper they inexplicably hit it off with. And now he’s on their boat. These impromptu connections make the game, and the characters, seem alive.
Video games, specifically RPGs, are also full of these moments. It’s no coincidence I run a game emotionally rooted in NPC relationships. I too seek out RPGs where there is a focus on getting to know the ensemble.
Most recently I’ve been enjoying The Outer Worlds. There’s a lot to love about this game, but what keeps me coming back is the crew I’ve assembled as I explore this dystopian galaxy. There was a quest early on with my first companion, Parvati, who was smitten by a fellow engineer on one of the planets we’d been exploring. After talking to her enough, I was told that they had been texting, and then before I knew it, my next quest was grabbing drinks with Parvati at the nearest space bar to discuss this whole romantic saga.
I was really dreading the game potentially adding an unnecessary battle in the bar, or have the text be a red herring for some higher stakes conflict, but thankfully the game honored my genuine interest in the situation and the quest was exactly what I wanted it to be: a night out with a friend. This is one of many moments where The Outer Worlds showcases just how extensive the dialogue options are, and thankfully there were options that matched my genuine investment in this scenario. Parvati has a lot of questions. She’s unsure what to order at the bar, and even more unsure what she should message her crush. She worries that she was making up the whole thing, and like all human beings, is afraid that she will be rejected for being herself. This quest has arguably the lowest stakes amongst the life-risking missions I had taken on, yet it also felt the most important to me. I genuinely wanted Parvati to believe in herself. Her vulnerability mirrored so many conversations I’ve had with close friends in similar situations. Suddenly the rest of the game felt in orbit around this small moment of trust between two people.
We so often fight to “save the world” in games, but when we experience organic, seemingly innocuous moments between friends — sometimes that’s all we need to fight for.
In the Pursuit of Reality
by Brendon Bigley
The closer you look into a game, the more it unravels before your eyes. It doesn’t matter if it’s something as simple as an invisible wall, an NPC repeating the same dialogue so frequently you can recite it verbatim to your friends with the EXACT same intonation, or if it’s something as imperceptible as a button prompt with copy that just doesn’t FEEL right — your mind will catch it, bottle it up, and file it away. But these things aren’t all negatives! In fact, some games are great because they remind you of the medium to which they contribute.
Lately though, I’ve been considering the future. I think it’s fair to say the pursuit of realism will never end, and I’d even go as far as saying it feels like the white whale of a portion of the industry at large. Every subsequent AAA franchise title, every console generation, every graphics card iteration boasts a higher fidelity. It’s almost as if removing the traits we associate with “video games” is the end-goal. What happens when we find that far-off holy grail of realism? When technology catches up with and even surpasses our wildest fantasies? Virtual and augmented reality are just stepping stones to what many see as “the dream” outcome: Perfect, uninterrupted immersion.
I have to assume the Ready Player One or Black Mirror idea that “games” become “experiences” is probably correct, but I wonder how we as fans describe such an experience in this age. What happens when nothing about a game seems to imply that it even IS a game? Say, for example, some far future “interactive” allows one to walk through a specific forest in the northwest and talk with other travelers, hikers, and locals. These might be real people, but they might be generative AI capable of inventing personalities, backstories, and conversation on the fly. You’d never really know the difference between the two.
Say this forest followed an equally generative calendar of events, changing time to match the world outside, changing seasons as the months passed. Using whatever technology is available at the time, you’d feel the sun’s heat or the autumn breeze. You’d feel the weight of your boots as you trudge through the snow as it piles up, and you’d smell the indigenous flowers bloom with the spring. You could climb a peak and sit on a small rocky outcropping, peering down at the small town below. The idea of this being a “game” fades away: This is just life now.
How do you even begin to describe that… thing?
Hasakal Forest Review: Yeah, This is the One… Is That Okay?
I’m writing this from inside my cabin in Hasakal Forest. Today is breezy but calm; the lake is so still it appears like glass. From the window of my writer’s nook, I can very literally see the moon reflected below. In fact, every window I peer from appears as some painterly mountainous vista, too unnatural to be real, yet real enough that I’ve since hiked those same cliffs. It all feels like a dream. As I write this, my partner is out grabbing something quick from a local food cart so we can go to a karaoke bar in town with some friends after. The past month has flown by.
For the last 27 days (February is a month, too!), my partner and I have been living in a modest — yet modern — cabin in Hasakal Forest, part of the greater Hasakal Valley region. Within a 30 minute walk is essentially everything we could ever want: a lively town full of friendly people, various places to hike that never feel quite the same upon repeated visits, a beautiful lake for fishing or swimming or whatever, and the list goes on. Our first few days here were spent wandering the area, getting to know the locals who, unsurprisingly maybe, were so excited to meet us. We wandered the trail closest to the cabin, taking our time absorbing and fruitlessly attempting to scrutinize the sights, sounds, and smells. One such hike found us hitting it off with another couple on the trail who had also recently moved into town (April and Ryan, if you happen to meet them too!), and the four of us spent the next night drinking fireside wine, setting fireworks off by the lake, and asking life’s big questions.
The next morning, the four of us robbed a bank. Our newfound friends, to their credit, were more than adequate heist partners. Ryan, tall and imposing, was crowd control. Under her watch, not a single patron attempted to play the hero. My partner spends most of their time in the wilder parts of Greanne City, and as such has enough experience with explosives that they expertly blew the vault door right off its hinges with almost no trouble. April, according to her wine-imbibed tales the previous night, spent a few years making ends meet as a cab driver*, so she patiently waited outside once we’d grabbed the cash to make a break for it. Readers who know me would be unsurprised to find that my role was to circumvent the security system to wipe any and all recorded video data or x-scans. All in all, we made off with about three million dollars, which apparently equates to somewhere in the realm of 700Qs.
We laid low in the cabin for about a week surviving off the meager provisions we’d prepared before the first drone appeared outside, and from then it was only a matter of a few hours before we were taken into custody. Not wanting to spend the rest of my review period in a prison cell, I requested a load from an earlier, safer state. Almost immediately, my partner and I found ourselves back sitting around a campfire with Ryan and April mid-story, wine in hand. We’d had our suspicions that the two of them were simulants (April saying she “worked” as a cab driver was pretty telling, if I’m being honest), but they’d been so convincing I didn’t really feel the need to ask at any point.
And that small decision to not ask has been the beauty of our experience with Hasakal Forest so far: For all intents and purposes, it’s real. I could spend a week walking in a straight line through a trail and never find an end. I could spend tomorrow talking to every townsperson and wake up to someone new and exciting moving in the next morning. With the exception of our self-imposed snafu with the law, I’ve miraculously avoided any impulse to alter the world in any real way — a planned outing drowned out by rain becomes an even better day inside spent watching classic films — although there was one morning in which my partner muttered a command to make the sun go back down in their sleep because waking up is hard!
Point being: Hasakal Forest is proactive as much as it is reactive. All of the tweaks you’d want exist, but the world anticipates those tweaks ahead of time and frequently weaves them into the greater world so seamlessly I have to imagine most of its users will never notice.
This has been a staple of interactives by LLWorks, but not until this particular interactive have I felt their oft-heralded “a vacation from the competition” mantra really settle in. Compared to the anarchic Greanne City or more abstract sZones like AQua, Hasakal Forest feels like a place to live more than anything else. Gone is the pretense that your time can or should be limited.
Hasakal Forest can be forever.
And yes, this raises all of the classic questions that go hand in hand with the introduction of sZones as living spaces. As much as I’ve previously brushed these concerns aside, Hasakal Forest potentially marks the beginning of a new era for society — one in which interactives officially move past the point of being temporary worlds to inhabit for pure entertainment value, or the experiential resorts we snap into for a weekend getaway. Hasakal Forest, though subtle in its setting, is the first truly livable interactive, for better and for worse. And that “worse” is something we’re all going to have to contend with in a big way going forward, because this is truly just the beginning.
As a writer, I have the benefit of being able to do my job from inside an interactive such as this, but outside of those specifically built for work it’s generally hard to find one as robust and accommodating as the cabin from which I currently write. Arguably though, most work would be absolutely untenable from within even Hasakal Forest, which understandably raises concerns about the broader clientele for a sZone such as this. Yes, the technology has become more affordable over time, but it makes one wonder where the endgame for humanity lies if everyone has access to a “perfect” space all their own. Are we truly going to put the fate of the world in the hands of AI while every human of-age is snapped in?
These are questions I can’t answer in a review of an interactive. In fact, these are questions no one person will single-handedly answer at all. Over time, as with all technology, the norms of the day will shape themselves around what we’ve wrought, balancing out into something resembling an equilibrium.
But for now, and to be as reductive as possible, Hasakal Forest is as perfect as it needs to be. I’d recommend it, if you have the means. You can live there for a month, a year, a decade, however long you wish and still find new things to do… but it means leaving the physical Earth behind. It’ll be up to you to decide if it’s worth the future, or if you even find that to be a worthwhile concern.
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We could never thank you enough. ❤
Stephen + Brendon
