Composer, designer, and puzzler Chris Remo joins the panel to cover how specific instruments evoke moods in games, Mad Libs as branching path narrative, and VR’s Myst problem. Hosted by Alex Jaffe, with Frank Cifaldi, Ash Parrish, Brandon Sheffield, and Chris Remo. Edited by Esper Quinn, original music by Kurt Feldman.
Sunsoft’s parent company Sun Denshi was, until very recently, part of the same corporate family as a controversial Israeli “counter-intelligence” company called Cellebrite, and armchair JP game industry analysts used to constantly trip up at instances of Sun’s share price skyrocketing in times of wider industry downfall, not knowing that it was always tied to Cellebrite scoring a new gig with the NSA or some other clandestine government org, and not because they’re making Waku Waku 8 or whatever.
(the weirdest online instance of mistaken identity I’ve ever personally encountered came from someone hunting down my private email to ask me what I knew about Cellebrite—they were working on some European lawsuit against them and somehow thought I had insider dirt, and then accused me of carrying water from them when I insisted that I couldn’t help them.)
I always used to listen to Idle Thumbs when it was going, and while it was interesting it was like a reverse insert credit - they were into all of those twee “Earthbound-inspired platformer about mental health” type indie games (and Firewatch is one) but somehow knew less than nothing about any Japanese games and would occasionally have their mind blown by encountering one. Like, I remember an episode where someone had just started Persona 4 and was really pumped because of how amazing and innovative it was that it was set in high school.
(Unfortunately you have to get that kind of naivete just right or else you just end up with a lot of mispronounced foreign names.)
I guess it’s a testament to Remo’s broad acumen that people have such different contexts we know him from. For me, he’s just “one of those guys in those Double Fine documentaries,” for you he’s an “Idle Thumbs” guy, for others he’s the “NYT Crossword YouTuber,” and clearly for some folks he’s “guy that worked on VR at Valve.”
In the middle of the intro and the story Ash referenced was The Snowy Day. It was a book written in 1962, then turned into an animated special in 1964, then had a 2016 remake for Prime Video. It might have been shown on Sesame Street but I can’t find evidence of that.
I only know this stuff cause my wife had the book and we read it to our kids A LOT when they were younger. It’s a great story and recommend it to anyone.
(A link to Wikipedia for the show notes if Esper feels like it should be added.)
The thing about VR that has surprised me is how much it has become a tool for 3D artists. A lot of other 3d people I have met use it as a sculpting and animating workflow and swear by it, and love the damn thing.
oh man hahah that first question about crossword difficulty was made for me
i’ve been making and getting crosswords published for like a decade 10+ now off and on and have in the past couple of years gotten a full time job as a crossword and other puzzles editor (usa today, apple news+, universal, puzzlesociety.com and others) and so i can tell you all a lot about how the difficulty is decided!!
most places have that monday easy to saturday hard difficulty ramp that chris mentioned. usa today and a couple others try to have all the puzzles at a more entry-level monday-style difficulty no matter what the day is. the difficulty comes mainly from the clues themselves and not as much as the answers in the grid, but the answers do come into play. for the most part, in modern crosswords, names and other proper nouns are the biggest sticking points – not everyone follows the same celebrities or sports or music genres or brand names or whatever. modern crosswords also have basically excised the wild obscurities that used to be in puzzles in like the 1970s/80s and if you put some like, genus of beetle found only in the andes you’re not gonna get that puzzle published. different venues will pull from different spheres of knowledge, too, like chris also mentioned, depending on the intended audience.
so that means the clues themselves are mostly gonna be how to modulate difficulty. the word WINE in an easy puzzle could be something straightforward like [Pinot noir or Cabernet] where a more difficult puzzle might clue it with less-direct wording or some kind of wordplay like [Cab, for example] (with the misdirection of not knowing if we’re talking about a taxi here or not). Difficulty can also be mitigated by carefully cluing crossing answers – if there’s a less-known name going across in the grid, having all the answers crossing down thru that word being more easily gettable is really helpful so you don’t end up with, say, the artist Helen Frankenthaler crossing tyler the creator’s new album Chromokopia at one square and then having some some solvers just not being able to know what letter goes there.
anyway i could talk forever about this and i should probably be doing my actual crossword work right now but JUST FOR STARTERS!!! there’s a lot going on before a puzzle goes out to the public!
Some thoughts on the VR question: I think Ash was close but a little off with her cabinet comparison. I think it’s more like getting a wheel and pedals and such for driving games. Those people are getting the headset to play certain types of games in a certain way. Unless you got it just for Beat Saber. Then the comparison is perfect.
I think the biggest hurdle is that it’s really hard to convince users of the experience. With a Switch you can see someone playing Zelda and think, “that it looks fun”. They press a button, cool thing happens. They hand you the controller. You press a button, and you “get it”. With VR, it’s way harder to show that in a video. You see someone slap their hands around and Batman beats up some goon. It’s not fully communicated how it feels to play until you actually play it and realize that these controls do work, the immersion does click, and you can’t get this from an Xbox.
And god forbid you get VR sickness and need to build up a tolerance.
I deleted a whole lot of rambling about other points, but I think that’s the most important. The problem with segmentation and lack of console sellers is a whole other thing.
Frank’s description of a rental space that houses extremely extraneous hi-fi equipment is no different than folks up here having a shared cabin on a lake or up against some suitable hunting land. I could see my generation do exactly what Frank’s talking about in a big way.
Connections infuriated me at first, too, but became one of my favorites of that bunch. There’s a discernible logic there that I’ve picked up over time. Like a crossword, there are often multiple ways to arrive at an answer. Like, I can either know the connection, or there’s a way to puzzle through it. There will often be two or three words that have a relation, but nothing else fits, so I can rule that idea out. Or, there will be more than four words that could fit, like they rhyme or something, which I also know can’t be it, but perhaps along the same lines but more specific. And of course, the player only needs to get three out of four categories to win.
I think over time I just became familiar with the types of categories, too, which is also a lot like crossword puzzles. Crossword puzzle clues are a kind of language that gets learned.
If that high res miniature painting game MoonBreaker had a VR mode I would be all over it with trying to dual wield sprayers and manually adjust distance while applying coats. I would spend all day treating a huge gray-scale bug like a sports car at the paint shop.
