#getting credited for their input don't get me wrong!! it just feels odd to see a character name next to an actor who's 0% how I pictured

[kerryweaverlesbian]

One interpretation of the fictional "Grundy Farm" from BBC Radio 4's farming radio drama "The Archers" suggests that the Grundys, this whole time, have had a MASSIVE horse and they've just never mentioned it

[kidmachinate]

Two Sides

Light and dark, good and evil. That's things people like to hear about. Certainly people don't want to hear about the literal two sides of a coin. Some of the most recent two sides of the coin one could say would be quiet quitting and quiet firing. While I understand the use of these terms, like most new made up terms, these things were happening already. We just have buzzwords for them now.

Quiet Quitting can be unfair to a company, assuming the company is good. The employee chooses out of nowhere to simply do the bare minimum. To a company this looks bad. How dare they do what they are supposed to do for the amount of time they are supposed to do it and then leave on time. They literally decide to do their job...and that's it. No more, no less. There's technically nothing wrong with this but just don't expect to get promoted when doing so. The only part that truly makes it unfair is where the quitting part comes in. Alongside doing what is required, it is done in silence. They will provide next to no input things, keep to themselves, look for the next role, and then just up and go. This is also pretty much the default state for many my age as stability is hard to find at times. We like this. We get toTake the Power Back"as they say. This is harder to do in a role where metrics come into play. Everyone has them to some extent, but sales roles or money driven companies all about their KPIs are probably gonna flip the switch.

The other side of this coin blindsides the employee. You get denied a promotion, a role switch, or assigned a role you didn't ask for. A complete turnaround you aren't expecting. Before you know it, a lot is changing...but it is to force you out. Quiet Firing. Why do we need buzzwords for this stuff? It was already happening. Anyway...all changes and even if you were trying to go because you see the writing on the wall, they want to be the ones to put you out...except if YOU quit, no unemployment or severance for you. Even if they eventually cave and fire you, even after putting you in crap work conditions, keep in mind there are sneaky aspects to this as well. Severance is basically hush money and who can blame anyone for taking it...but the company gets to avoid guilt and/or not be out in a bad light by a disgruntled employee. People like to toss around the word gaslighting a lot when it comes to abusive relationships but work counts too. Your boss or other authority figures can very much make you feel crazy for your valid concerns.

Both situations are a bit uncomfortable and I'm not on the side of a company really, unless they are truly one of the good ones, or the only way to know 100% is if you're the one in charge of the company and hopefully you don't do the same thing to others. The point really, as many things or people can have two sides to them, you only focus on your two sides. Do you let yet another setback, caused by you or not, turn you into a caring and or determined person, or does it turn you bitter and resentful. I recall a particular role in which I was given the chance to shine before a shift in management. One where I was able to manage for a bit. I liked having a team and helping them along their path because a year before then, I was on the same one. I didn't forget where I came from. Didn't just bark orders and expect my team to cover up my for shortcomings, or take credit for what they did. Didn't want to show two sides. Just the humble one that got me into a good place to begin with. Money itself isn't evil it's the people that use the tool, which then choose whether to be a good or bad person with it. Even life or death is two sides.

The whole premise behind this page is to keep choosing the former against all odds and not have each and every post made be the last, unless we choose it to be. Then we make new stories, even if not told here.

[symbianosgames]

Game Developer magazine's Brandon Sheffield reflects on what designers can learn from their first video game loves. (Originally printed in Game Developer's March issue, available now.)

They say you're forever dating your first love. Not literally, of course, but the early patterns set by your first relationship, and the relationships of your parents, tend to strongly influence how you approach love and relationships for many years to come.

I wonder: Is the same true for games? Do those early games we played in our formative years influence what we now perceive as "good" and "bad" in interactive media? Do they influence how we design games? I submit that they may.

Let's think about a series like Dark Souls/Demon's Souls. These games are punishing, require rather exacting inputs from players, and have somewhat fiddly controls that require getting used to. That sounds like a nice recipe for a failure stew. So why did these games succeed?

One of the praises you often see from reviewers is that the series reminds them of the glory days of Japanese console and arcade games, which were built with much the same recipe. It's like a new love affair with an old flame - the same problems as always, yet sweetly, lovingly familiar. Japanese publication Dengeki said of Demon's Souls, "Fans of old-school games will shed tears of joy." IGN reviewer Sam Bishop echoed the sentiment, saying, "Those that can remember the good ol' days when games taught through the highly effective use of intense punishment and a heavy price for not playing it carefully should scoop this up instantly."

But what about people who didn't grow up with that experience? What about those who are more used to frequent checkpoints, and the game providing a full experience to blaze through in one go, rather than in halting steps? For them, the game is a harder sell, which is why Sony passed on publishing Demon's Souls in the West, and core-oriented niche publisher Atlus had to step up and do it instead.

For Demon's Souls, its link to the past helped it succeed. But perhaps the reverse can also happen: Our personal game heritages could, at times, make us slaves to our past interests. For example, I tend to like games that are interesting, but flawed. To me, a glitch in an otherwise super-polished Call of Duty is extremely glaring and illusion-shattering, but I'll happily forgive poor graphics and the occasional invisible wall in a game like Nier, which stabs out in all directions with new ideas. If a game tries hard to do something different, I'll forgive its faults - and if I want to be a designer who makes games that are good at making money, this preference for different-but-flawed could hold me back from making games with commercial appeal.

With this thought in mind, I decided to dissect my own past as a player to see what influence it might have had on my current interests.

My history is a bit odd - I went from the 2600 and Intellivision (which were already old when I got them, but they were affordable!), to the TurboGrafx-16, which I saved up for months to afford. And this is the console that informed my early days as a player of games.

The Valis series, for example, is not very well known, but I played it to death. It's an action, platforming, hack-and-slash affair that stars a high school girl, out to save the world, with a sword taking on a horde of monsters. Pretty standard fare for the 1990s.

You could jump, perform a sword attack, use magic (and could power up both of these attacks), walk, and roll. I replayed Valis III recently, and I noticed something about those rolls that may have influenced my current interests and design habits. Rolling allows the player to travel for a set distance, both under obstacles and across gaps. But this distance is such that, at times, beginning a roll just a few pixels one way or the other means life or death in a difficult platforming section. On top of that, the platforms themselves can occasionally have dressings that don't count as area you can stand on.

This is most likely something one would want to avoid in the modern era, because it feels like the game has tricked you, when you've clearly made the roll visually, but it's counted as a death. Less obvious, though, is the triumph you feel after defeating that particularly difficult section. It's as though you've succeeded in spite of the game's efforts to thwart you. You are actually fighting against the game itself, which we're generally told not to do - but in a modern game like Demon's Souls, it makes the thrill of victory that much more compelling.

There is a lesson here for me as a designer: I can sometimes focus too much on making things smooth for a player in the immediate term, versus their long-term experience.

I won't bore you with my history as a player, but revisiting these old game-loves continually revealed patterns in my current thinking. For instance, Bonk's Revenge's somewhat mystical and alchemic systems helped drive me to chase the elusive beast that is emergent gameplay in a simple game world. But is that my white whale? That pursuit has, at times, led to feature bloat (which is exactly what happened in the subsequent Bonk installment, incidentally).

Just to make sure I wasn't the only one who's influenced by his past, I asked my friends Tim Rogers of Action Button Entertainment and Frank Cifaldi of Gamasutra.com, with whom I record a weekly podcast (which is also called insert credit), to talk a bit about their formative games, and found them similarly branded by past experience.

For Cifaldi, it was The Secret of Monkey Island, which gave him the first glimpse of a full, living interactive game world. This colored his interest in games for years to come; when he was young, he made adventure games in HyperCard, and later, when he was working at GameTap, he made an interactive community adventure game called Captain McGrandpa.

Rogers, meanwhile, thinks Super Mario Bros. 3 is the best game ever made. SMB3 is very much about precision and timing of jumps and reactions, but also about secrets - warps, hidden passageways, and coin boxes in the sky. It's no wonder, then, that the first game he directed (ZiGGURAT for iOS) is a deceptively simple game about timing, precision, and nothing else - aside from the occasional secret.

For your human relationship problems, you can go to a therapist - but they'll just reflect back what you already know. I highly recommend you take a self-analysis approach to your game history. Going back and dissecting those early learnings can help you grow past your earliest ideas of what a game is, or can be, because while most lessons will be good, some will be bad as well.

The musical platformer Sound Shapes is an interesting case study: If you read the postmortem in the December 2012 issue of Game Developer, you'll see that the game's mastermind, Jon Mak, said, "I don't like platformers, or level editors, but in the back of my mind they made sense." He also added, "That was a thing that we learned: We couldn't achieve our design goals with what we would do naturally."

So here is an example of developers playing against their type, and against their early imprint. This worked well, and brought Sound Shapes to critical acclaim, and many IGF nominations. But at the same time, is it any wonder that (sorry, Jon) the game just doesn't feel like a solid platformer? It feels like an interactive music toy where platforming happens to be the mechanic to drive progress. Without the music element, this would not be a loving homage to the platforming genre.

There are lessons in our past for all of us. Try it out on yourself; think about the first game that really grabbed you. Maybe it's the first game that compelled you to keep coming back, aiming for a perfect score; maybe it's the first game that made you feel like games were a living world; maybe it's the first game that let you play against another player.

Revisit these games with new eyes. While playing them, think about the jump distances for platformers, or how you start a drift in a racing game, and how long that drift lasts. Think about the level progression in RPGs, or the score multipliers in a shooter. How has your current work reinforced those old ideas? How have they strayed? Should you be more critical of those old ideas? It's an interesting exercise which can yield some surprising results. Even if you don't come away with something practical, you may have an easier time explaining why you prefer to sink hours into Minecraft over Skyrim - or the reverse.

The kids of today expect autosaving, persistence, checkpoints, and massive interactivity on a Minecraft scale. And they're not wrong to expect it! That's what they grew up with, and that is to some extent the future of entertainment. But when they grow up, what will they expect from games? What will their first love affair teach them to love and hate?

Getting closer to the now, what about kids who grew up with the Nintendo 64? The precise magic of GoldenEye 64 has never been properly revisited. What of a child who grew up with the Dreamcast? Is anyone serving her needs?

I'm not suggesting we need to mine the past and prey on nostalgia. But attempting to serve similar experiences to those people felt in their youth - in new and modern products - can be a valuable goal. Nobody wants to play a new game that's exactly like GoldenEye 64. They want to play a game that feels like how they remember GoldenEye 64 at the time they were playing it. With a little self-analysis, and a careful study of these bygone eras of games, you might just get at that mystical and elusive feeling.