In the Land of Wonderful Dreams

[Friday]

I just woke up from a dream in which I was attempting to help Thad fix a computer that was also a car. In the end, we installed the Witcher Crossover, which was a game featuring Bears driving Formula One racecars. Brentai was present in the dream, but was locked in the garage.

[Mongrel]

That last line.

That last line.

[Brantly B.]

I was locked in a garage full of open pesticides as a kid and nearly hospitalized.

[nosimpleway]

Remember, the garage is where Friday keeps the mountain lion.

[Mongrel]

Remember, the garage is where Friday keeps the "mountain lion".

[LaserBeing]

well, there's a cougar involved somehow, that much is for sure

[MarsDragon]

I was napping at the yarn store in town and when I woke up, there was snow! It was snowing! It was shitty, wet snow, but still, wonderful snow. I ran back to tell my friends who worked there and started trying to compose some tweets about the situation. In time, I realised that this was a dream, and I should wake up. I told the dream that obviously this wasn't real, and I should wake up now.

I woke up in the back of the yarn store again and annoyed, demanded to wake up again, for real this time.

I woke up in a different area of the yarn store that the dream suggested was more realistic. But it wasn't real, so I yelled at it to let me wake up again.

The dream apologized to me and I woke up again in some white room, feeling blurry and out of it. Feeling a little panicked, I told the dream that this wasn't right either, and I wanted to wake up.

Finally I woke up in my bed. I'm pretty sure this is real.

[François]

if this is real, why do i have all this yarn

[Mongrel]

"Elementary! We're still in the holodeck!"

[zaratustra]

so I dreamed that by paying a small amount to charity you could have a wrestler pin you or one of your pets

I have a bad cold ok

[Stush]

Last night I dreamed that I left my car lights on and drained my battery. Even in my dreams i'm plagued with worries about car stuff. I miss public transport.

[Niku]

I dreamed that Tyler Perry teamed with Nintendo for an adorable crossover franchise side scrolling platformer at E3.

It was unanimously declared the best thing of the show.

[Büge]

Last night I dreamed that my sister was using my computer but the desktop wallpaper was a naughty picture, so I was trying to stop her from minimizing windows.

[Brantly B.]

Been there.

[Friday]

was the desktop pic Kazz's ass cause yeah that is a super common problem from what I understand

[Lyrai]

I was Hatsune Miku. Like the actual one. I was wandering around Hokkaido Japan. I know this because I kept tugging my snow parka around me.

Each time an otaku tried to run at me my hair would come alive, form into knives, and gore them and toss them away and everyone loved this.

This went on for hours.

[Mongrel]

This is a long post and maybe could even go in the amateur game design thread, but anyway...

I was working with a charitable group to design a video game where you're a Nazi officer. Well, an officer in the Wehrmacht anyway.

It was actually a moral teaching tool to help people understand the difficulty of making moral decisions and the whole idea was that it would recognize that people who play video games with moral systems based on behaviour understand they're playing a video game and typically game the system or at least understand how it works and don't really care too much or else typically play what they "think" they are ("I'm good! I always play the good guy!").

The design was predicated on the idea that you would become one of these lone heroes who defies the Nazis from the inside and tries to save people. But you couldn't just choose the "good" action at will - the core mechanic for the "good" side was that you had to build up the courage to do good actions by doing minor things actions in the storyline or showing bravery in combat and that you actually needed a certain amount of courage built up to be allowed even make certain moral choices. All choices would always be shown you, they were just greyed out. The courage bar was "stepped" in that actions over time would fill it, and using it would spend some of that courage (but not 1:1, just a fraction), BUT at certain intervals (which were fairly frequent), the courage meter would lock in, at a new minimum. So if you had, say, 20 courage and there was a threshold at 30 and you did two actions that built it to 32, the lowest courage you would ever have is 30 and even if you now ran into a moral decision that cost, say, 5 courage, you would only drop to 30. No action that built or lost courage would be fully guaranteed - an RNG would determine success or failure, though obviously the risks were weighted, so choices would be mostly safe, with a few high-risk ones, but the game would generally make you aware of the risks of doing things before undertaking them.

The actions that build courage tended to be little acts of very minor resistance, and bigger things would cause you to spend courage. Eventually there would be bigger things you could do that required your active participation (beyond just making a decision), like say helping a bunch of refugees escape the Reich, and if you pulled it off successfully, you would actually gain courage overall, possibly in large amounts.

Functionally, it was a story-based game, that played more like a visual novel, but did have action sequences where you actually had to run around and do stuff in first or third person (mostly when you were sent into combat).

Plot-wise, you play as Jurgen Lindemann, an aristocratic type in his late 40's who was pretty much a poster-image of aryan propaganda, being a tall nordic fellow with a square jaw, though with greying temples. Jurgen is an officer who had previously risen to Captain as a mediocre staff officer in the Great War, and Major afterwards, but who had later been cashiered from the Heer (army) and jailed for life due to an incident your gross negligence having killed several soldiers in some sort of operation. I wasn't sure if your going to jail was at the end of the Great War or after, though I think it would have to be later, in the late 20's or something for the game to work (you needed to have had a life outside war, but went to jail well before the Nazis came to power - you also needed to have been in jail for a long time, so at least a decade). On the eve of war, you're freed conditional on "good behaviour" as the army needs all the officers it can get, however, you must start again as a junior lieutenant (another aspect of the game was doing well in battle to get promotions, which allow you more authority, more freedom of action, and to do bigger things). You have a family, a wife and one young son who barely knows you, and I wasn't sure how relations with them would colour the game, but obviously they would be important. Jurgen is politically neutral - the game makes it clear that while in prison Jurgen would still have learned about Nazism (in passing), he is not a party member and the game explicitly refuses to tell you if you identify with Nazism or not.

Obviously if you fail, or just go balls-out you can be sent right back to jail or even executed so you have to choose what do do and can't just pick the courage builder or moral action every time. So in the beginning when you have no rep, you will sometimes compromise - offering the Nazi salute when it's expected of you, or later on, say, accepting a house for your family to live in that's been taken from someone (but lets you have your family closer, which maybe helps give you courage?). Being an honest-to-god badass hero is really only a late-game possibility.

I remember the earliest missions had been laid out. You get out of jail and there's a small side trip, where you can build a little courage straight away by visiting an old artist community you used to know (as they're "disreputable" types). You build a little courage by quietly visiting a show they're putting on, and you can build a good bit more (by the standards of the beginning of the game) by talking about how afraid you are but that you're happy to have the chance to prove yourself again (Jurgen is something of an optimist to start - he's just so happy he got out of jail and can see his family) even if you have to start at the bottom. The first combat missions actually don't involve combat as they're during the occupation of the Sudetenland, so they just serve as a tutorial on how to issue basic commands to your troops.

The "evil" part of the game was where we were having difficulty. First there was an argument about whether we even wanted the player to have the option of being a full on nazi asshole, but most of us felt that offering moral choices at all would be totally hollow if we didn't. But then we had the difficulty of figuring out how on earth do we actually make a game where you get to be a full-on evil nazi while still trying to teach a moral lesson AND still being self-aware about how little twelve-year-old shits play video games. So far the best idea we had was to actually punish the player. Being evil lets you unlock more exciting and splashy combat missions, and more of them, but they require you to do horrible things (further arguments about whether these would be, just alluded to, something that happens on-screen that you have to accede to and witness, or something you have to actively participate in), but it would actually be quite short - you get a burst of extra missions during the invasion of Poland, and then you get a big promotion and a promise to unlock a big campaign and play a whole bunch of really big splashy battles, only instead you get assassinated by a partizan and kicked out of the game as a fuck you to the player. This wasn't optimal but we did like the idea of "Oh you want to be evil eh? Well fuck you!" unfortunately while it satisfied our more visceral instincts, it made for a poor teaching tool, so were were trying to figure if there was a way the courage system could be inverted or perhaps an entirely new mechanic could be created to teach a player about the perils of evil.

And then I woke up.

I like the idea of the courage meter though! I thought that was a really cool idea for a game mechanic, where you want to do what's right and you can see what the right action to take IS, but can't because you're afraid.

[François]

Yeah that sounds like an interesting mechanic for sure. Makes me think of Papers Please combined with Depression Quest. You don't often see "social forces vs individual will" modeled to that level of granularity in a video game.

[Caithness]

I was Severus Snape. In the back of my chauffeured car on the way to work I said the Lorem Ipsum spell, which summons a toothbrush. Instead I got an ad informing me that this morning's toothbrush was sponsored by Cyborg John McCain and that I should say the spell five more times to get my toothbrush. Annoyed, I called John up to see what was going on.

"I need your help, Snape."

I assumed he was referring to his cyborg body, which I could see from the video call was just the top half of his body grafted onto a vacuum cleaner.

"I told you, it's taken care of. I personally made all the arrangements," I said.

"That's the thing, though. It's not."

I sighed. "Alright, I'll come take a look. But I have to go to work first."

"Okay," he said. Then my alarm went off and I woke up.

[Mongrel]

Forgot about this while trying to get stuff uploaded today.

I was walking down Broadview street near our place, across from the Sobey's grocery store. It's night and I run into a dude in a brown trenchcoat and jeans and he looks like he drinking from a can that's been crushed, then more-or-less reformed into a can shape, with no label, just white paint marked by all the lines where the can was bent. "b e e r" is written on the can in sharpie.

He and I have short but amiable conversation about something vaguely philosophical, which gradually suggested he's a kook who is predicting climate change = end times conjuring up deadly heat waves and tsunami so large the continental shelf is revealed. That then he mentions that one should watch out for the harbingers of the second coming or whatever, hands me a piece of paper, and rockets off into space like a supersonic bullet, abruptly streaking upwards like some kind of high-speed reverse meteorite.

For a moment I'm just dumbfounded, and all I can think about is hey, how fast is he travelling that I can see it in near real time, even though it clearly took him only about three seconds to clear orbit? (I could see him until he got to about the moon's distance.

Then I look at the paper and it's some kind of weird cheque. A jesuscheque, covered in Christian iconography. When I first glance at it, it is for $25 Jesusdollars, but at some point it becomes more ornate and is now for $125 Jesusdollars.

Then the weather starts to get real funny, in a bad way, with storms and heat rumbling in and walls of water visible in the big valley nearby.

Two guys show up and about this time the entire aesthetic of the dream changes to anime. Now everything is a cel-shaded cartoon and the two guys who are here look like dour anime protagonists in a fantasy anime, with weird FF/YuGoiOh-type way-overly-elaborate outfits. They're friendly though and start talking to them, wondering if they know what's going on. They say they're two of four disciples risen as part of the whole end times bit but manage to just avoid mentioning which ones they are. They tell me that I'm a fourth and should go with them and possibly address me by name (I didn't actually think of this in the dream, but waking logic would lead me to guess I was supposed to be Matthew, given that's my real name).

Then a third one arrives, similarly attired with red eyes and I start giggling internally about this silly Japanese interpretation of the gospels. The new fellow is radiant and extremely charismatic and smooth, while the first two are getting a bit insitant, and that's when I begin to realize that the first two are emissaries of Satan sent to mislead me and the new arrival is the the big bad himself. I'm about to call him on it, and quietly begin preparing - somehow? Was I charging my Jesuslaser? - for Big Anime Jesus Battle, but then I woke up.