StaceyPowers

This is a thread for sharing some real-world thing you learned by playing video games recently. It annoys me when people say that playing video games is a waste of time or keeps people (i.e. kids) from learning. For example, the other night I finally played through Vault 11 in Fallout: New Vegas. While looking up some clarifications on the story of the vault, I found out that the film that is played in the vault’s final room is a reference to the Milgram experiment IRL. This led me to reading up on that, thus teaching me more about history, psychology and experimental design. What have you learned about RL recently from playing a game?

Are there any quests you have never completed in games for reasons unrelated to bugs or boredom, but specifically because you didn’t like the choices offered? For example, right now I’m arguing with myself about finishing Veronica’s quest in Fallout NV. I’ll probably go through with it, but it’s hard to bring myself to bring the BOS destructive technology. I could see myself never completing it despite being very curious how it will turn out.

I’m trying to figure out if I can play FTL on my laptop since I don’t have a proper video card. Here are my computer specs: CPU: Intel Celeron, 1700 MHz Video adapter: Intel(R) HD Graphics 4400 (1839246 KB) up to 1684 mb dynamic memory Physical memory: 3976 MB I feel like it is probably an iffy prospect, but maybe still viable. @DylanC I figure if anyone has a good guess at this, it might be you.

Now I have. It's got a nice heft to it and looks perfect.

Have you played any games which felt unresolved at the end, whether in terms of world events or some kind of emotional payoff? If so, what would you have wanted to have resolved, and how would you have wanted it to be resolved?

I’ve noticed that there are some controls which are usually pretty consistent from game to game, but other button choices seem utterly bizarre to me. Like for example, “triangle” as the jump key is usually what I expect, but some games have it as “X,” which is just plain weird to me since I think of that as the “use” key. It got me wondering, if you could configure buttons for every game you play, what would your default setup be? I would probably go with the controls that are in Skyrim, more or less.

My first playthrough of New Vegas glitched into oblivion. On my second playthrough, I’ve been prioritizing the main quest line so that I can actually complete it this time. I got to the point where I had to decide what to do with Mr. House, and I wound up trying really hard to spare him. But I got stuck murdering him because of his attitude toward the BoS. I’m not a BoS fan by any stretch, but I just couldn’t walk in there and murder all of Veronica’s family just because he hated them. I found his character elicited a mixture of pity, admiration and disgust from me, and deciding what to do with him was one of the more complicated decisions to weigh out in a video game. New Vegas fans, what did you think of Mr. House? And what did you decide to do with him and why? @kingpotato @DylanC

When you are playing an RPG, do you prefer your character to be a complete “blank slate” onto which you can fully ascribe a personality, or a character already well developed? Or do you prefer something in between?

Is there a game you have played which is so obscure that you think nobody here has likely heard of it? @The Blackangel @Executor Akamia @killamch89 @kingpotato @DylanC @skyfire

Do you ever try to think up workarounds for things in video games that would otherwise bother you by coming up with an explanation in your own head? For example, I find the voice acting of the Inquisitor in Dragon Age Inquisition to be extremely monotone. So I have told myself, since I am playing a mage, that she is a Tranquil, and that this is why she speaks like this.

Thanks!!

Oh yeah, that got downright confusing at times! "I've been in this cave before ... or have I?"

I'm glad to have brought a moment of levity to your day =D

The first time I heard it, I was so busy asking myself "did he really just say that?" that he killed me hahah.

With most video games, the player is in control of the game’s hero, the character who has the most influence and who alters world events in the biggest way. But there are exceptions. I recently finished Dragon Age II. Without getting too spoiler-heavy, there is a character named Anders who takes quite a bit of flak from players for a variety of reasons involving everything from his sexual orientation to his politics. But suffice to say, he eventually makes a world-altering decision with zero input from the player. It doesn’t make him a “hero” in a classical sense, but it does arguably make him the most important character in the story, and not the player. My theory is that this is the real reason why so many players complain about Anders, whether consciously or unconsciously. One of the main reasons we play video games is to feel that we are important, influential, and in control—because that is how we rarely feel in our real lives. I wasn’t upset with Anders throwing me out of the driver’s seat, perhaps because I sometimes like more true-to-life experiences in games. But I can see why that loss of agency might annoy some players. How do you feel when you don’t get a say over major actions your followers take? And how do you feel when another character is the ultimate “mover and shaker” in a game world, not you?

I finished my first playthrough of DA II the other week, and I thought it was a really great game. While I liked Origins better in some respects, in others, I ended up thinking DA II was superior. But I’ve noticed both online and offline when people talk about DA II, they usually don’t seem impressed with it as a follow-up to Origins. While I rarely hear anyone say that DA II is “bad,” it seems to be damned with faint praise. Explanations I’ve seen range from ridiculousness like “Aveline has a square jaw and a monotone voice” to “the game has too many side quests” to “Anders is bi” to “Kirkwall is an inadequate setting.” I’m sure there are legit criticisms of the game (I can easily come up with a few), but none of the arguments I’ve seen really serve to convince me that these are the explanations for why the game wasn’t received more positively. Does anyone have any theories for why DA II wasn’t more liked?

Has anyone here played DA Inquisition on PS3 by any chance? I started a few days ago, and sometimes the action gets a bit “stuttery,” especially if there are a lot of characters in the environment doing stuff. It was pretty minor until I got to the Hinterlands, and now it is quite obnoxious. This seems to be an issue related to frame rate (I think). If anyone knows any fixes for this, please let me know. Thanks!

That would be really hard to do. You can't upgrade a torch, can you? And the fire damage wears out when the torch burns out. At least with the wooden sword, you can upgrade the sword the way you do any other weapon if you grab some wood.

The splicers in Bioshock say some pretty crazy things. There's a doctor one that shouts something like "There's SEMEN on everything. EVERYTHING!" But for some reason, the one that makes me laugh the hardest is the splicer who when he kills you says to the voices in his head, "He's DEAD. Now will you ... SHUT ... UP!" It's more the delivery than the line that makes it so great. Dragon Age games also have a lot of funny, campy lines. Like there's a point where a duke falls off a cliff, and Hawke announces in DA II, "Looks like the duke ... has fallen from grace." Gotta love bad puns.

German, Polish and Czech. So we have something else in common :) With the letter G? "Going to appointments."

I ordered it. The seller has to make them to order, so I haven't gotten it yet. It's tungsten, btw, not gold and silver, so that is better.

Thank you so much!

Recently finished up Minerva’s Den DLC for Bioshock 2, and concluded my first playthrough of Dragon Age 2. Minerva’s Den was great, though it left me with a lack of resolution in some respects. Dragon Age 2 is ridiculously underrated.

That does sound interesting, as does the description of the game now that I've Googled it.

Ah cool. I shall check into it then.