Mount Rushmore of Gaming Part 01 (Episode 274)

On Gaming the System, host Matt joins Alex and Jem to kick off a lighter episode building their “Mount Rushmore” of gaming icons.

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Transcript

0:15

Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Gaming the System, the podcast where three intersectional feminists examine gaming and games through a feminist lens. Today I am your host, Matt, and I'm joined by my friends Alex and Gem. Before we get started, if you want to support us, you can subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/gaming system for some exclusive content. Or you can send us a one-off donation via PayPal to our email address. We are gaming the system@gmail.com. I. So today we are going to be going through something a little bit lighter, a little bit of fun. We are going to do our Mount Rushmore of video games. We are going to go through, so presume that everyone knows what Mount Rushmore is, but basically it's a mountain in America with the faces of four former presidents carved into it at Litre Mountain and. We thought, why not do that? But with gaming icons, now this is going to be a, a very broad, it can be a very broad definition of icon. It can be a developer, it can be a game, it can be a franchise, it can be a some form of technological advancement. But that is all up to us. So to start off with, I'll go with. I'll start off with a game and that is Elden ring. So I would carve Elden ring into that, into the, into the mountain because it has completely revolutionized my appreciation for the design of art of any kind for, because I played it for over a hundred hours, got every ending. For the first time and understood nothing of the world as I went through. And I didn't care.'cause the gameplay was awesome and the world was awesome, didn't understand anything that was happening. So in terms of having something that is so visually stunning and also gameplay, that is stunning. That is, that is one part where it raises the game. But then the, the transcendent part is the narrative. Where it is only told through the environment and through very sparse, cryptic dialogue and through like one or two sentence descriptions of all the items in the game. And I found a law channel called Motown who does epic length floor videos and just every single awesome little thing in Elden ring. It has a massive universe of law behind it, and so it revolutionized my, my appreciation for telling a story and creating a universe, and it's. And just the more I think about it and the more I'm still finding new law videos, finding things that I've, I've, I've never heard from all the other ones I've found. And just the more and more you look, the more and more there is and quite apart from it being staggeringly fun game to play, it also incredibly inspiring. Work of art. And it's no, no mistake that this is the, the, the spiritual successor. So the Dark Souls games'cause this is from software, the, the originals who created it. So. So for them to create this, for anyone, to create it really, I find myself thinking often about it. I can't believe that this exists. I can't even begin to fathom how, how a group of people went from nothing to to this, to this experience. And I've been. I, I desperately would love to, to just go and talk to all of them exhaustively to know, how did you, how did you do this? Tell me how I can do it. And ah, man, just every time I think about trying to write something like that, just, and then, then, then someone will explain, oh, did you notice this about one of the tiny. Tiny elements that no one else has noticed in this character. And you go, I, I haven't even made three things that are obvious about the character to be awesome first, and, but that's, that's what inspirational things should be. There things to. To just go, oh, that, that's what's possible. It's like, uh, Simon Peg in Hot Fuzz. We need to see the, we need to see the Nicholas Angels of the world so that we can aspire to, to, to yeah, pursue the things that excite us and that we can, we can break loose of the boundaries of, of that. So that's my first phase. I'm gonna go with Alex. What's your first face? So it will come as no surprise to both of you. I had to go for La Croft slash team raid as it was instrumental in, in bringing me into the world of gaming at the tender age of, of six. And it's a pretty iconic and legendary franchise, and it's celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Spoilers for my age. But, uh, it's, you know, the impact of it is as a, as a game centering a female protagonist in a time where there were no basically no female protagonist. Also bringing about. A new leap in technology. I played it on PC initially, but I know that with the PlayStation one, it was a big leap into sort of a 3D world and 3D graphics and, um, using polygons and in new and inventive ways. And it really kind of broke the mold in terms of well, I suppose. I dunno, you call it an action adventure game. It was really the early ones, team 81 in particular had a lot less combat than the later team Raiders. It was a lot more focused on puzzles and sort of platforming in the 3D sense, like navigating your way through rooms and figuring out how to open doors and find keys, et cetera. But yeah, I'm, I'm sorry, I'm slightly going off track, but yeah, so just because. I love it so much and it is what still makes me very excited about gaming today. Laura deserves her place on, on the mountain, on the mount gaming, I suppose we call it. I dunno. Yeah, that's, that's my first one. Yeah, she's a hundred percent one of the original 3D icons, and I think about her quite often, especially as she's, she's been. More in the, in the zeitgeist recently with the new games coming out and then the less, so the Sophie Turner? Yes, I heard movie. Um, did you hear that she's been injured. They've had to halt production. Yeah. They've not said whether she got injured during production or outside of production, but, um, so hopefully she can recover and, and she's all right. They've not said how she's injured or whatever, but, I read more about the cast, actually. It looks like a pretty interesting cast. Jason Isaacs is in there. Oh, I love Jason Isaacs very, I love Jason Isaacs too. So yeah, there's a couple of other people whose names escaped me currently, but it is a very exciting prospect. Definitely. And I keep forgetting Sophie Turner, of course played Samsa Star in Game of Thrones. So I, I'll kind of, it'll be difficult to move away from that'cause that's obviously what she's most famous for. She was when she started out a lot younger. So it'll be interesting to see how much she's sort of changed and sort of moved into this particular role as, as Crot. But I'm sure she'll be fabulous and I'll look forward to it. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I still, I still can't imagine anyone other than Angelina Jolie as, as her, who looks thinking, oh, she fits the role perfectly, but they still made her wear, bra bra enhancers. That's really funny. Ridiculous. The, she, there's so much like, like the sexualization of her is, is like part and parcel with her, but it has always felt that she is been bigger than that. She's been LaCro. And then the sexualization thing is a side thing. Rather than, it's never felt like she exists only to be that. And I think that's something that the, the, the remakes, like the reboot trilogy missed quite a lot because it feels like they went, we don't want to sexualize her physically the way that she has been in the past. But then that sort of does a disservice to Laura as well.'cause you think that Laura would look the way she looks. And she would, she would look exactly the way that she chooses to. She would present herself like that, and then she can be sexualized in a way that she wants to be, and that's okay. There's a, there's, there's, they're just artists haven't developed a way to recognize that yet, and Laura would be the perfect place. Mm-hmm. I think she was definitely lacking some sassiness in the modern trilogy. Well, I understand why,'cause obviously they're leading up to that. But I just think you know, she's got to, she has to be able to sort of stand up for herself and, and, uh, and thinks, and of course she did do that, but in a way that I found didn't ring true to me for, for her character in that modern trilogy. But, uh. Yeah. Each to their own, I suppose. Yeah, maybe. We'll see, we'll see, we'll see. Well, the future is certainly varied for LaCro, so we'll see Indeed. We'll see what they come up with. Yes. Jim, what is your first face? Okay, I am going to take us all the way back to 1998 and um, I'm gonna put Thief, the Dark Project Forward. It was a a Looking Glass Studios. I just. Interactive game and I've talked about it before because I just loved it. It was, it was probably one of the first proper sort of PC games that I played. I mean, I'd obviously played PC games before that, but most of them were text based or quite like little ask things and maybe doom. So, but Thief really brought in a whole new concept around gaming, around this idea of sneaking about and not, just running about and hand hitting things. It was actually about like lurking in the shadows and shooting somebody with a bow or stabbing someone in the back and, you know, it's, it was the precursor to one of your favorite games. Hitman, Matt. And, um, you know, I think without, without. Thief. We wouldn't have a lot of the games that we've, we've loved and talked a lot about on the podcast and it was certainly the first game, the first PC stealth game to actually use light and sound, um, as part of the, the mechanics of the game. And I was sort of looking at. Into like interesting facts about the game because this, this topic is so open that I was like, oh, what, well, how am I gonna choose? I mean, how do you choose four games for this sort of thing? But anyway, so, so some of the, the fact, the interesting facts that came up for it were, um, which I didn't know was that originally it had. Being intended to be a a normal sort of hack and slash so the idea was that you went, ran around the city beating things up with your sword, but when they were doing gameplay testing, they found that people generally avoided the NPCs because there were so many of them that it was quite difficult to kill them all. They were like, Hmm, maybe we can do something with this in, in our game design. So they actually pivoted and made the game more about sneaking about and hiding in the shadows. And I, I have sort of aside from the fact that I really enjoyed playing it one of the things about the game is that they had these sort of. Well, they called them like ai, but they're not like today's ai. But, um, AI guards who had these routines that they would go through. So they would stand somewhere, have a little conversation, and then they would walk somewhere else and have another little conversation walk back round. So they would, they were doing, they had like. Roots and routines. And if you were engaged and sensible and clever, you wouldn't like clock that at that point there's, they separate, separate and you can, um, go in and, and take one out without the other one attacking you. But the other thing they did was they also talked to each other and they would say. Stuff that would give you hints about things you could do in the game or places you could go, or where there might be like weapons or where people might be. So if you just sat and listened round a corner or behind a, a box or something like that, you could, you could learn so much about the game that you could just as easily wander through and not ev not ever hear those things and you, and just find your way through anyway. So. I think it was just really revolutionary in, its in its approach. And obviously, you know, 1998 is, is sort of early internet days, so it's, it's very, very early on and very sort of, historical. So I think it, I think it was ahead of its time in a lot of ways, and I know that. There was a second one brought out and then they, there was all these rumors that they were gonna bring out a third. And I think there's been all sorts of problems with the, um, the IP and who owns it and who, and people not wanting to do anything with it now. And, and, and to be fair, it, I dunno if they could recreate it because it was of its time. But the other reason why it's always sort of holds a special place for me is because it was. It was, it was a game that my, my boyfriend at the time was playing and, um. His computer was in our bedroom. So, and this was in the days before anyone used headsets and things, like, just nobody even thought about doing that. And his, so he, so he used to be playing and he was always up really late. So he'd be playing this game and sneaking about and they'd be like, and then like, you know, hearing people dying and stuff. And I used to have the weirdest dreams when I'd like come to bed and he was. Still playing this game because I had all this weird sounds coming into my head, and in the end I was like, you have to turn the sound down. I can't cope. I'm having such weird dreams. So yeah, it's just a very good game and definitely de deserves to be, um, up there on Mountain Rushmore. Well, this foundation games that the further and further we get away from those, the, the. The harder it is to imagine a world without that kind of mechanic. So yeah, like playing hitman and then playing the dishonored games recently and just going back and going, oh, that's, it feels like a, an unsophisticated version of something from this game, but it feels unsophisticated'cause it was one of the first ones to do it. And. It is disappointing. So like with Star Trek at the moment, star Trek is in the, in the news a lot at the minute because the new Star Fleet Academy show's been canceled. And there are people, captain Kirk, William Shatner himself has been, has been saying that Star Trek has, has always been woke. And that to, to criticize it. Now this show based on that is nonsense. And that's true. If you're coming at it from a point of you don't like, social justice and diversity and all those riping things, that's one thing you should, you should want it to be canceled because it's a obscene piece of shit. It utterly shits on everything that Star Trek is and has ever been. It's an, it's a, it's a, it's an absolute. Just I, there aren't the words to, to, to describe how appalling it is as a Star Trek thing, but then the, but then it's the, I have the original and then its legacy is not just Star Trek thing, it's all the other things that it paved the way for. So it, we don't need, we don't necessarily need Thief two because we've got Hitman, dishonored and everything else. Right. My second face is going to be. I will go with another game. So this was a tough one. It was either going to be, whether it should be a game or a character or a franchise or of which franchise should it be? I don't know. I don't know. I think I'm gonna have to go with CTOs from God of War because he was the, my real. That was my like coming of age game, whereas my first ever one was Hercules, playing on the PlayStation one in my nappy, and then God of War came out 2005 and just gave me this. This just power fantasy ultravit outlet, which I clearly needed and still need to be able to just violently deal with all the problems that are coming that, uh, that you are faced with. Um, and then that's an example of it. It just, it got better and better and better and better and better, and then stopped. Then came back completely different, but still exactly the same and better and better and better. So it was made by a studio that was pushing the absolute boundaries as what's possible on the PlayStation two, and then pushed the boundaries again on PlayStation two with the second game then was the push PlayStation three to the technical limits again in the third one. Then PS four, the God of war, God of war, Ragnar Rock plays on a PS four somehow. And so both the, again, like with Elvin ring, it's the artistic creativity is one thing, and then there's the technical brilliance, which is a a completely different thing. And then. It's the one that has, it's, it's gone from PlayStation two to PlayStation five and it's going to carry on, carry on into the future.'cause it's just going from strength to strength and just Yeah, it has, yeah, it has to be on, it has to be on Mount Rushmore. The other, my, my other. I've talked myself into it because the other one was Assassin's Creed, the franchise, because that's been around for, for me for a long time as well. But that started in 2007 when the Pierce Yeah. Say when the PlayStation three came out. Yeah. And but God of War was 2005 in the middle of the PS two. Mm-hmm. So. Yeah, retos is great. Big dunno how hard it must be to sculpt beard into rock, but we'll, we'll find a way. Alex, what is your second face? So I took your words where you said we could make it as broad as we liked and ran with it. And I am going to be representing all sort of tabletop sort of, uh, parry party type. Games with my next entry, and this is Bagatelle. Do you know what bagatelle is? No. No idea. Okay. So it's it was popular since the 19th century. It's a direct ancestor to modern pinball. So basically if I. It's basically a board, like a wooden board with loads of nails in it. And they're in all different shapes like arches sit like this. And you have a little round silver bowl and you put it in the chute and you fire it off, uh, with a lever and it goes right round the top and you have to kind of get it to go into the little nail basket. And each of the baskets has a different number attached to it. So essentially you set yourself and your party a score, say like 525 and you each have to try and get to that number without going over that number. I'm going bust. We have a bag of towel board that we bring out every Christmas at home. So it's a really important game for, for our family and a very big Christmas tradition. We have tournaments and on the back of our bag of towel board is a little, um. Adhesive label where my uncle has written the, uh, board record for the person that scored the highest amount with 10 10 of the balls. And then, um, like a, a. Sort of best number to go for in terms of a tournament setting. Somewhere between 400 and 600 is usually a good idea, but, uh, we, we take it very seriously. It gets very, very loud. We're very glad that we happen to live in a detached house at Christmas when I go to my parents.'cause we will literally scream the house down watching the bulls go around and then different people getting buss or, or, um. Having like one shot left. That's, that's, thank you Matt. That's a brilliant, Matt's just sharing some images of Bergal. Ours is more of a brown board. Yeah, like that, that one there, yeah. Yeah. The large bag of tail table top. Um, that's exact, more or less exactly what it looks like. And it's incredibly fun and, uh, very, very competitive and it's very old game, but I think it serves as a really decent representative of the types of games that you might play. In the pub, for example, like those sorts of games. Or you can easily have them at home and play with friends and family. But I think also it's, it's just nice to remind ourselves of like the more analog types of gaming. Of course we do discuss tabletop gaming, board gaming here on the pod, but I thought, no, I'm gonna put Bagatelle up there'cause it's, uh, a classic for us. So yeah, that's my second chance. I've seen those in, in pubs. I've never ever played it. It's so fun. I dunno how it definitely give it a good, yeah. I've never known how it works, so that's really interesting. No, it's, it is good. Um, we do have to sort of prop it up a certain angle sometimes just to get the flow of the, of the little balls. Right. We do a couple of test shots to see sort of how they're falling through the. Free the pens.'cause the, the, the skill is you can get it to bounce off of different pens to go into different sort of baskets, just like in pinball. But there is a knack to it, definitely. And it's very fun trying to work out, work out the different tactics and see how if sometimes you might need only five points and then you do a very gentle shot, it just misses and floats all the way down to the 125 basket and then you bust. So yeah, there's all sorts of interesting scenarios, but yes, I think I won in I think two goals last year or my second goal. I got it right straight away and I think that was one of the best I've ever done. I was, I had a very lucky run where I had like several high scoring balls and then just so happened to, to get it with the last last shot that I had. It was very exciting. And then it was about another hour or so until everyone else managed to finish because they kept busting. So yeah, it can go on for quite a while. Yeah, definitely. And those, those like, it feels like they're from the 18 hundreds, that kind of, that kind of game. Especially when you look at those, those particular just Google Bagu tell if you want to see what it looks like and you'll go, oh, one of those, and two, that looks dangerous. It looks like a, a bed of nails that you could fall over and step yourself on. Then Yeah. That it feels like, yeah, pub games like turn of the turn of the last Century Pub games. Yeah. That's cool. Gem, what is your second face? Um, yeah, I'm really struggling actually to decide what my second place is. I think it's going to have to be. Uh, the Sims because again, we've talked a lot about the Sims in the past, but it's came out in 2000, which is weird'cause in my head it came out in about 1985, but, um, but it came out in 2000, the first one and the latest content for it came out this year. So, you know, it's. Still running 26 years later. Um, which I think is pretty impressive. And apparently it was sort of conceived of when the, the guy whose name I have forgotten, uh, when the designer Will Wright were, um, lost his house in a fire. And it, so he. Came up with this idea of, of creating a game where you re when you build a home, and it's kind of, I'm guessing it is like the OG Sandbox game really, because it didn't have any any goals. The goal was simply. To play and to create and to, to follow your little sims around. And I think the, the fact that when you get to the top of your career ladder in the in, in the game, you basically stop and start again. So, you know, I think that's quite interesting. And. I'm still talking to people today who are just starting to play it or just getting into it, or people who have played it their whole lives, or people that have been away from it and gone back to it. And I, I, I have many versions of it on my PC and, and my PlayStation and, you know, it's, it's just one of those games that I think is. Really unique and interesting and has not had a decent competitor in all of those 26 years. Nothing has really come along that has toppled the sims from its slightly niche position, but it, it, it, it's very simple. It's very basic, but it does, it just does it really, really well and. The, one of the things that they were, that I was reading is that apparently they, they, when they originally started working on it, they weren't given much budget or much sort of, you know, there wasn't a lot of hope for it because it was such a different game from what was coming out at the time. And they were doing a demonstration of a wedding. And suddenly a couple of the NPCs in the background just spontaneously kissed because that was just, you know, part where they got to in their little conversation or whatever. And that's one of the things that's lovely about the Sims is that you, you can micromanage your various characters, but you can also just let them go off and do their own things and they will. Quite often die, but they'll also go off and do all sorts of stuff. Fall, fall in love, fall out of love, fall in the swimming pool, turn into a werewolf. There's all sorts of things that could happen. And apparently when these two characters kissed in the background, everyone went wild and they were like, Hmm, this is, we're onto something here. We're onto something here. And I think that is really the heart of it, that it, that even though. It's quite a simplistic game. It's allows you to rebuild your life, which I guess was the, the basic kind of concept behind it. Given that, that it came out of this house fire and you know, you can build your life in the game, you can replicate it. I replicated my first. Home, my first house that I, that I bought and. Used to like play around, play in there and, and just, it was just lovely. And I know other people who've actually used it to try and, you know, work out what they should put where in their rooms and things like that. So, you know, people are just using it for all sorts of stuff. And there's some amazing videos and stuff online of things that people have built with it and. Stories that people have done. I, I watched a little miniseries where these people were just creating this whole sort of like, drama within the Sims and they were just doing like a little soap opera with the sims as the, as as their medium. And so it's just a really interesting game and fun community as well. So, yeah, no, I think it's definitely a, um. Deserves a space on that mountainside. And I think the symbol rather than a face would have to be the sort of little, I dunno what you call it, like a little diamond thing that goes over people's heads to tell you how happy they are sometimes. Think it would be good if we had that in real life, actually. Definitely. Yeah. I can get on board with that. Yeah. That. Again, like going, the further you go back to like the, these foundation games, the, the harder it is to go. Well, I, I would find, I wouldn't find it very interesting that that type of game doesn't really speak to me. But when that nothing like that existed and there wasn't another option, I can't, I can't imagine because we've, we've, we've crossed so many, like. So many like technological boundaries and creative boundaries that it feels like the, the, the room for great big innovation is, is much smaller than it was in the past which is disappointing. But yeah, the, the Sims is clearly one of those ones that people have had entire massive, like universes of their lives that they've been able to. They've been able to spend in these things, and it was most certainly have been the predecessor to, um, Minecraft. Mm-hmm. Um. Any other kind of life simulator thing. So yeah, I think all of those are excellently placed on our own, separate Mount Rushmores. They think they can, uh, they can face each other and admire each other, right? So thank you both of those. We are going to bring this session to a close, and then we will come back again with the other two faces on each of our mountain Rushmores. So until then, we'll see you next time. Bye bye.