Until Dawn

I enjoy horror films and often find myself disagreeing with decisions the characters in horror films make. Until Dawn drops the player in a typical horror film scenario, but gives them control of the main characters. The decisions the player makes will determine whether the characters survive the night. All the pieces that make a great horror film are in place in this game, from jump scares to plot twists and turns. It’s not the most original story, but the way you get to play through it in Until Dawn feels fresh. The acting, music, facial expressions, animations, effects—all of it came together in an enjoyable experience for me. I had a lot of fun re-playing it multiple times, trying to see the impacts that different choices had on the dialogue or interpersonal dynamics between the characters and to collect the PS4 trophies. This game is fun to play with people, especially those who appreciate horror films.

Life is Strange

Life is Strange is an adventure game set in a high school where a girl discovers she has the power to rewind time. For this reason, the idea of choice and outcome was one of the main themes of the plot itself and an idea that the main characters struggled with, rather than simply a game mechanic. I enjoyed trying to unravel the multiple mysteries unfolding: the disappearance of someone, weird weather phenomena, all the agendas and stories of the various characters that populate the world. It was fun to see how characters responded to my dialogue choices and to rewind to see if I could get a “better” response out of them. I admit that I was a little stressed out at times for fear of making the “wrong” decision, but I eventually got over it.

I appreciated that the main characters were teenage girls and that the game explored friendships and relationships between and among girls. This perspective and these sorts of plots are severely lacking in games. Had the game starred a male lead, the game would have changed in tone a lot, and would have detracted from the unique perspective brought to the table. If I was much younger, this game would have been so impactful and so important to that younger me, because as much as there is a paucity these days of female-led games and stories about women and girls (much less for women and girls) and games with queer content, it was even worse when I was growing up. Anyway, this is a wonderful game and I highly recommend it to everyone.

I used similar tools and methodology in 2014 as I did in 2013. The majority of my photos were taken with a smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy S4. I published most of my photos on Instagram and cross-posted them to my photo archive on Flickr, my Twitter feed, my Facebook feed, and to my Tumblr blog. I relied on IFTTT for automatic cross-posting. I did photo editing using the Instagram photo editing tools (which were much improved in 2014!), Pixlr Express, or Photo Grid.

My approach was the same as in 2013: create a unique and interesting picture. I continued with the minimalist style I favored in 2013. I imposed a hard rule on myself never to skip a day, and I am pleased to report that I didn’t break it.

There were a few notable trends in my 2014 Project 365 set. I published fewer photos that included the sky. I took up rock climbing and published a climbing-related photo each time I went to the climbing gym. I took more photos of objects, especially up close.

I tried to get better as a photographer. As I expected, doing this for another year was tough, especially with the limits I placed on myself. I do believe that my photography composition and photo editing skills have improved.

You can view all the pictures from my 2014 Project 365 here and from 2013 here.

Some Favorites

I’m not going to discuss every picture, but I want to call out a few that I like.

I like how the colors turned out in this picture. Many of the photos I take with my phone are taken in less than ideal lighting situations. I often need to edit them to make details come out.

I enjoy taking grid style photographs of everyday objects because the image is like a window into what I was doing that day. For example, I dumped out all the items in my everyday bag and arranged them in this photograph. The picture below was taken on the day that I finished obtaining all the equipment I needed for climbing. I wanted to mark that occasion and have a picture of my gear it all got dirtied up with chalk dust and other grime.

I quickly completed The Last of Us and The Last of Us: Left Behind in preparation for GaymerX2. This photo that marks the start of my adventure in post-apocalyptic future USA. The counterpart to this photo marks the completion of the game.

The original photo turned out quite dark. With some editing, I was able to enhance the bright color of the popsicle and this enabled the texture of the ice to become more visible.

I like how this ice looks with the brightness of the iced tea. This photo was taken at night, but I used the light from my computer monitor to illuminate the drink. Then I edited it and added an Instagram photo filter.

I love architecture. I try to take cool pictures of buildings at every opportunity. I wanted the Grace Building in New York to look imposing, oppressive, and dizzying, so I opted for high-contrast black and white, and shifted the angle of the photo.

I enjoy Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural designs. I visited the Guggenheim Museum for the first time in 2014. When editing this one, I tried to focus on the purest elements of the building, cropped everything else out (the museum is on a busy street in the middle of New York), and de-saturated the colors to emphasize form. This was my most-liked photo on Instagram ever, with nearly 500 likes (so far).

A “pocket dump” photo is a common subject in the Instagram community. As you can see, normally I don’t carry a lot in my pockets or on my person. That blue thing is my wallet.

I was waiting for my bus to work. The weather was perfect Seattle autumn weather. Autumn is my favorite season. I felt good about my outfit on this day. I wanted to remember this moment, so I took a picture. This photo turned out quite well, and with some editing, I got the colors to really pop.

2015

In 2015, I will try to participate in Instagram’s ongoing Weekend Hashtag Project. The Instagram Community Team selects a theme, announces it on Fridays, and participants in the Instagram community have the next couple of days to post photos that reflect this theme, tagged with the specific hashtag. Then on Monday, Instagram publishes their favorite photos from the hashtag. I don’t know if I will be able to do all of them, but I’ll try.

Aside from that, I don’t have specific goals or plans for photos, and this feels good.

Here are notable games I played in 2014. These are also videogames that I actually completed or devoted a significant portion of time to.

The Last of Us, The Last of Us: Left Behind

The impetus for finally playing The Last of Us and its downloadable story pack, The Last of Us: Left Behind, was my impending participation in a panel at GaymerX2 about queer identities, which also included two panelists who work  at Naughty Dog. I knew they would be talking about characters in The Last of Us, particularly Ellie, so I wanted to understand what they were talking about. I’d actually had this game for a long time, but never got around to playing it.

This Sony PS3 game is set in a dangerous post-apocalyptic, former United States of America, where most humans have been infected by something bad that turns them into super-gross mindless killers. The military runs Quarantine Zones, one of the few pockets of relative safety that remain. You you play a violent and emotionally detached older man, Joel, who makes his living as a smuggler. Joel has to protect and escort a teenage girl, Ellie, to a nearby Quarantine Zone. The job doesn’t go quite as planned and the journey becomes much longer and larger in scope than Joel initially imagined.

Minus all the climbing that the UNCHARTED games have, the third-person action controls and cinematics in The Last of Us were quite familiar, which was nice. The survival action story was engaging and the characters mostly interesting and three-dimensional. Ellie is a great character and it was great to see the interpersonal dynamic between her and Joel. There were some interesting and emotional moments, especially when the story went in directions you may not have chosen had you been playing a different type of game. This is a game that tells a particular story, not one where you get to change the plot. The ending made me think a bit, debate, and it was somewhat open to interpretation. I liked that.

Ellie takes the lead in the downloadable prequel, The Last of Us: Left Behind. The story revolves around Ellie’s relationship with Riley, Ellie’s best friend who she grew up with in a military boarding school. Riley returns after a two-week disappearance and they decide to sneak out to have adventures in a nearby abandoned mall. The adventure goes sideways, of course, and neither of them are the same afterwards.

[Spoilers ahead.]

What I enjoyed about Left Behind is the exploration of Ellie and Riley as characters and their relationship. Facing the departure (whatever kind of departure that is) of a close friend/crush/girlfriend is hard under any circumstances, especially for kids, but facing it in a post-apocalyptic setting is something else. Ellie and Riley were wonderfully acted by Ashley Johnson and Yaani King. I felt like I was watching two actual teenage girls interact with each other. The jokes, easy conversation, emotional arguments, and everything were all well done.

Kudos to Naughty Dog for creating Ellie, one of the very few queer female lead characters that exist in the triple-A game landscape. It’s rare that we get to see a teenage girl’s perspective in triple-A games, rare that we get to see friendships or relationships between teenage girls depicted, and even more rare that budding romantic relationships involve teenage girls in triple-A videogames. These are perspectives that gamers don’t often get to see, and I am glad that Naughty Dog created this story.

[End of the spoilers.]

If you have The Last of Us, you must play Left Behind.

Gone Home

All the critical acclaim and adulation from friends and acquaintances didn’t compel me to move Gone Home out of my backlog. Yep, I am a lazy gamer. The fact that fellow GaymerX2 panelists might reference Gone Home, did give me the motivation to complete this short game.

Gone Home is a first-person exploration story PC game set in the 1990s Portland, Oregon in the United States. The plot unfolds through objects strewn about and hidden throughout your family’s house. You have just returned to an oddly empty home from a year abroad. You explore the house to figure out what happened and where everyone is.

[There will be spoilers.]

Like The Last of Us: Left Behind, the story in Gone Home includes a romantic relationship between two teenage girls, but unlike Left Behind, this relationship is central to and a bigger focus of the plot in Gone Home. While the relationship between your younger sister and her crush is a central focus, you also get to learn about other members of the family, their troubles, secrets, and relationships.

The way the storytelling is conveyed, through the various personal paraphernalia in the house, is quite well done. I didn’t play many hidden object, puzzle, or point-and-click adventure games when I was growing up, so the conventions of this genre haven’t long been a part of my gaming vocabulary. I love exploration, though, and I quickly got the hang of what I was supposed to do.

As someone who was a teenager in the 1990s, Gone Home felt authentic and like a genuine blast from the past—Super Nintendo games, mix tapes, Trapper Keepers, riot grrl music, The X-Files fandom—it was all there, and so awesome. What also felt authentic is how Gone Home portrayed teenage relationships, from the joy of being best friends, to the developing giddiness of a crush, to the awkwardness and raw amazingness of first love. Gone Home featured some really solid acting from the cast. The emotions, the insecurity, the discovery—it all felt real. Media doesn’t often elicit strong emotional responses from me these days, but I could relate emotionally to and identify with the characters in Gone Home.

I am happy that Fullbright chose to convey a story of first love through the experience of two girls. As I mentioned before, storytelling from the perspective of queer teenage girls is exceedingly rare in videogames, much less any form  of media consumed by the mainstream. Gone Home is a refreshing departure from typical videogame tropes, and videogame culture is richer for it.

[End of the spoilers.]

Gone Home is an important game, and everyone should play it.

Fantasy Life

Fantasy Life is a cute action role-playing game developed by Level 5 for the Nintendo 3DS. It is set in a land called Reveria, where meteorites with mysterious effects are causing chaos throughout the world. You’re tasked with saving the world from the effects of these Doomstones.

You choose one of 12 jobs or Life Classes that give you skills to help you on your adventure. Life Classes are categorized into combat, gathering, and crafting disciplines, and you can switch Life Classes during the game without penalty or losing progress in other Life Classes. Each Life Class comes with specific side quests, so while you have your main quest to save the world, there is quite a lot to do, especially with so many Life Classes available.

The story is pretty typical of the genre, but where Fantasy Life shines is in the localization of the funny dialogue. I am sure that there were a lot of puns that couldn’t be translated to English and still remain understandable, but I feel like they retained the humor. I think the team did a great job.

I’d like to make note of the character creation. I think it’s really cool that all hair styles and appearance options are available to female and male characters, including facial hair and no limitations on hair length depending on gender. You still have choose a gender, but at least you can create the character with the look you want. You can even create skinny or chubby characters. They could do a lot better on skin tone, though, because I think there were not enough options for darker skin tones.

I bought Fantasy Life at launch because I had been looking forward to it ever since I heard about the Japanese version from a friend. It sounded like a lot of fun and the art direction appealed to me. I thought it was going to be sort of a goal-directed Animal Crossing, but it doesn’t have a lot of simulation or customization elements like Animal Crossing does, all of which is totally okay. Fantasy Life is a lot of fun. I played Fantasy Life hardcore for a while just after it was released, but I haven’t completed it yet. I’m not planning on mastering all 12 Life Classes because I don’t want to invest that kind of time into it and I dislike crafting jobs. I would like to master a few of my favorites, like Wizard, Angler, and Miner, though.