Post a Comment On: Digitally Staving Off Boredom

I tend not to advertise this blog a lot since it's mostly filled with a basic breakdown of what I have been doing over the past week.  I hope it's insightful for others, but it's mostly insightful for me: by documenting the passage of time, I have some frame of reference as to where all the time goes.

At times, it gets quite personal, I talk about dying pets or crisis I'm going through.  As a reasonably honest person, I feel my life should be able to be a relatively open book, so when I do things wrong I ought to fess up.  That doesn't mean I ought to advertise it... yet, that's sort of what I ended up doing when I shared this blog link on my "2020 in Roguelikedev" entry for the year.

Welcome, new readers.  As coincidence has it, this was a pretty terrible week for me, though fortunately without significant personal crisis other than one of the idle hands gone awry.

Now Playing: Wayward Terran Frontier... and horrible, depraved mods for other games.

If I heard of Wayward Terran Frontier before it was mentioned on Rock Paper Shotgun recently, I had already forgotten about it.  It's a stab at what I call The Space Grail, a game concept I've mentioned a few times before.  Whether Space or Holy, grails are notoriously unattainable, but there's naught but honor in the quest to recover them.
Game development is a wild ride, you never know where you will end up.  Most people never start developing games.  If you're really lucky, you'll at least make it as far as raising $42,000 on Kickstarter for your personal project.  If your customers are just as lucky, you won't just bail out like a coward and disappear, never to be seen again.

The customers were lucky with Wayward Terran Frontier.  In fact, the project is still going strong enough that the developers can charge $30 for it almost 4 years after it entered early access and still manage to get generally favorable reviews.  Living the dream!  (Beats the hell out of working for the AAA industry, I imagine.)

However, progress has been slow and incremental.  The common complaint is that the game doesn't look a lot different now than when it first entered Early Access.  Personally, I am quite sympathetic to the developer.  I waffle trying to put the most rudimentary feature into my game.  I imagine that a game as ambitious as this takes quite a bit of work to increment.

As a seeker of the space grail, Wayward Terran Frontier was my jam.  It got about 14 hours of play out of me this bizarro weekend.   I suspect it's good for another 14, tops.  Here's hoping the developer figures something out.

It has lovely simulated ship interiors, a 2D grid-based simulation of buildable starships featuring power routing and rudimentary oxygen containment that your player character can walk around in, tied to Starsector style combat.  But aside from that, it's a rudimentary, directionless grind for credits and research blueprints padded out by long, slow walks through starbase interiors about four times larger than they should be.

Right, time to start talking about the other big way I wasted my time this week.

It's considerably less admirable.

Mildly NSFW Content Follows.

I started this bizarro weekend out on an incredibly wrong foot.  My brain was rather unfocused, my introvert batteries completely drained by familial-children-entertaining obligations.  They were further eroded by a couple nights of insomnia that had me wide awake at 1am or 3am in the morning and unable to get back to sleep before morning.  Lacking focus, reasoned intention became elusive.

Here is how it began: I was talking about how neat Skyrim VR was on Reddit.  Excessive message board posting is procrastination at DEFCON 2 for me: at the precipice of total free time annihilation.  I failed to notice this, and so all was lost.  The cascade began.

Talking about Skyrim VR in such reverence got me thinking I ought to give it another play.  This reequired I launch the Nexusmods Vortex launcher to make sure my mods were up to date. Just then, I remembered a Rock Paper Shotgun video about The Sims 4 (possibly because they won't shut up about the Sims 4 lately)...
... and I wondered how fun would it be to check out an explicit WooHoo mod for The Sims 4 that Rock Paper Shotgun was talking up. 

Sims, subverted.

Look, I already told you I wasn't thinking straight.  In The War of Art, Pressfield talks of many weapons that creative resistance uses to undermine progress.  Here, in a time of weakness, was the meddling of the libido, and there is a page or two about that in the book.

Imagine a magical dollhouse, a bastion of make-believe where the inhabitants go through their lives in exaggerated emotes of real life, like extremely verbose mimes.  It's a somewhat goofy, if somewhat pandering and commercial, wish-fulfillment simulator masquerading as a life simulator.  Like most dollhouses, but on a computer.
That's been The Sims approach in a nutshell.  It's and safe and happy playground for the imagination.   Innately clever in its goofiness.  Innately commercial in its foisting of DLC and fear of offending the casual consumer.  Innately boring in its unwillingness to tackle the real issues.

In fact, to keep things nice and politically correct for the user of these dollhouses, the creators helpfully provide a blur filter censor bar over their bodies when they're using the toilet or the shower.  Or breastfeeding.  But, for many of the users, those censor bars are fascinating, hinting at secret treasures laying tantalizingly out of reach of their curious eyeballs.  Just look at how photogenic everyone is!  This injustice could not stand. 
[Image] So, through the magic of modding, the blur filter was removed.  But turns out the actual result of what's down there is kind of disappointing: dolls have doll anatomy.  So, a little more modding, they added some detailed naughty bits so there's actually something interesting to see.  And because they were now skidding down a slippery slope at light speed, it was only a matter of time until the modding community added the means for those dolls to explicitly engage in various sex acts.  Over 4,000 animations and counting now.

Welcome to the Wicked Whims mod.  It rapes the dollhouse.

Here is my experience with it.
[Image] No wonder I'm bored with The Sims 4, look how much more money I could have spent on it! I came back to see that EA has made many, many changes to The Sims 4, mostly related to the splash screen broadcasting that they have about as much DLC as a serial author has books.  I started a new household with a randomized name ("Alonzo Reilly") and appearance (looks like a chad to me) so I would not identify with him enough to fully shoulder his guilt.

I chose a humble less-than-$20,000 simoleon home and selected on the default furniture arrangement option.  No time to decorate: there was virtual philandering to do.  Shortly after taking residence in his new home, the welcome wagon event fired off, including the BFF household of three young adults, two of them women.  I welcomed them in and attempted to regale my sim's visitors with a delightful selection of random sims topics.

Formalities settled, I directed my sim to proposition one of the young women.  Not surprisingly, he was immediately shot down.  Did she find her new neighbor disgusting and immediately bolt from the home?  No, Wicked Whims isn't that kind of mod.  The welcome wagon event took priority, and they merrily bantered away in simlish, suffering only a minor mood score hit for my sim's impropriety.
[Image] Though there were signs of some discomfort... Though there is normally not even the option to proposition sims until you do a few things first, maybe it was not the mod's balance that so neatly combed over my lecherous invasion of the welcome wagon.  Being a fantasy simulator, The Sims makes seducing a sim is a fairly easy business: just talk to their ear off for a day or two until their mood score is maximized and they're pretty much putty in your hands.  Wicked Whims didn't add easy philandering, you get that right out of the box!

But I was impatient to see what this mod could do, so I enabled a cheat mode provided by Wicked Whims.  With the cheat active, my sim's sexual charms were irresistible.  Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, using a cheat mode on a sim to get them to have sex is no worse than deliberately drowning them, a common occupation of bored The Sims players.
[Image] There is a staggering number of options in Wicked Whims.   Just about anything you can think a mod like this needs, it probably already has.  Subject matter aside, it's a tour de force of community mod engineering. After the welcome wagon left, I invited one of the young women from the BFF household to "hang out."  The proposition was repeated.  After sharing a bubbly giggle over their impending copulation, my sim was finally doing the deed!

It was boring and stupid.  The "reverse missionary" default animation that came with the mod was tacky.  At least with the standard The Sims WooHoo you could use your imagination, but this... it's just boring bodily function laid bare!  I couldn't really see the appeal.  I uninstalled the mod.

Yet, The Sims 4 remained too boring to play.  So I later reinstalled the mod with some additional animations.  Hey, it's a really well-made mod.

Once again, the welcome wagon arrived.  To my surprise, even having barely filled the relationship bars with casual banter, my sim was suddenly propositioned by an attractive young member of the welcome wagon.  Did the cheat work in reverse?   If not, she must have really liked my interior decorating skills!  Of course, I was delighted to accept.

[Image] Yes, this counter seems sturdy, thanks Summer! Without a word, the rest of the welcome wagon left.  My sim and their new neighbor rigorously tested the sturdiness of a kitchen counter.  And the shower.  And the bed.  The animations did indeed make it a little more interesting, just look at them go!

My, what a charmed life they live in this mod (at least once you turn off the I'm-not-even-kidding-this-is-supported-by-the-mod unplanned pregnancies, STDs, and crabs).  This mod had successfully taken an ordinary dollhouse of fantasy wish fulfillment and turned it into a swinger's dollhouse of fantasy wish fulfillment!

But after the little virtual people had finally finished their helpless execution of community-designed animations, there was a problem: I was still playing The Sims 4.  Without the mod, The Sims 4 is something I played to death already.  With the mod, The Sims 4 is still boring, but now it has porn.  I didn't really need the stimulation, so I stopped playing The Sims 4.

Skyrim, subverted.

Could I mod Skyrim VR to be interesting to play?  Probably not, I've played that to death too.  But I knew there was one thing that was still interesting about playing Skyrim VR.  Encountering a life-sized polygon of a character is fascinating.  They're like holograms, seeming more and more alive the better they are presented as such.  The enhanced immersion for VR users means that they can better enjoy the sensation of presence.

If you know what I mean.

I had proven mostly immune to Wicked Whims' appeal, but it had still helped derail me.  I was not free of this deleterious train wreck of wasted free time quite yet.

When it came to Skyrim VR, I had already seen some of these lewd mods, and described them as "a bad scene."  For much the same reason why explicit WooHoo doesn't work well in the context of a dollhouse, the inhabitants of a fantasy RPG simulator have a lot better things to do than have their game turned into a porn movie.

But there is one major thing I had yet to try in Skyrim VR.  Some modders have added elaborate breast physics to Skyrim.  I had to see this for myself!
Breast physics. Having seen the result, it's about as good as the video above describes it in other games.  Maybe the problem is that simulating breasts is too hard for a large Internet modding community to do, but I am inclined to believe that something about the postadolescent male mindset can't resist converting breasts into having the same properties of anti-gravity gelatin.

Breasts are slippery slopes indeed.

The most immersion-ruining thing about the experience is that the body model changes with what the character is wearing.  Put a character in an outfit designed for "CBBE HDT" physics, and watching them walk down the street is like watching a woman with two foreign water balloons in her bodice trying to pretend she is not in distress.  Change that outfit, or take it off entirely, and you may get something completely different.  It would take a very careful mod mix to get them to match up.

As for the fact I was playing it in VR...

There's a VR game called VR Paradise on Steam.  I haven't got it because I don't think it's a good idea to financially incentivize porn.  But I think VR Paradise does one thing very right.   It's a virtual strip club, the kind of place I hope never to go in real life, but I understand rule of those establishments is, "You can look, but not touch."  In present-day virtual reality, even with motion controller interactive physics installed, that mantra is 100% compatible with the experience you are getting.

The post-procrastinatory hangover.

If I wanted porn, there are better places to go for that sort of thing than lewd mods.  Perhaps, if you live in a mindset where it is a perpetual immersion breaker for you that the characters aren't able to get it on, on screen, right in front of you, then these mods are a godsend.  But I should never want porn.  The brain is a computer: garbage in, garbage out. 

Moments of weakness lead to poor decisions.  Wayward Terrain Frontier rescued me from far worse occupations.  I finally picked up a good night's rest and regained my ability to make better decisions.  I have burned mental bridges to rebuild.  Better games must be made.