Minor spoilers for NBA2K20?
Butch:
Nothing. Mrs. McP made me distract the kids until 715 so she could do Important Work Shit. I told her that I don’t care how important her Important Work Shit is, I’m playing today, and she can stop working and watch her kids.
We shall see.
Feminina:
People gotta play. Or, people gotta have a few damn minutes to themselves, and if that takes the form of playing, that’s what they gotta do. And work needs to recognize that people have lives at home and can’t be on the job the same way they can in an office. It’s just not physically possible.
There’s a reason people used to go to offices to get work done, after all.
Butch:
Oh, I think Mrs. McP is all too happy to talk about how important her Important Work Shit is so that I HAVE to take the kids outside and she HAS to stay downstairs. It’s amazing that the laundry is very near to where her desk is, and, Important Work Shit be damned, she always seems to get the laundry done….
I mean, shit. Yesterday, she got mad at me because I wasn’t inside keeping the kids quiet when she was on an Important Work Call. Why wasn’t I inside? Because I was out raking the yard WHICH SHE ASKED ME TO DO!
Fuck this shit.
Feminina:
I’ve read some speculation that there are going to be a lot of divorces after this is over.
Also that there will be a lot of babies born in nine months, but they will all be first-born children.
And then there are the domestic abuse concerns, so probably a bunch of people will also be murdered, but that gets pretty dark.
I think people were really not meant to spend all day, every day, in such close quarters with such a limited group of other people. We’re supposed to be out foraging or whatever! Even small bands of hunter-gatherers have more than five people in them. And aren’t stuck in one spot raking lawns and doing work calls for months on end.
Butch:
The hunter gatherer life has a lot of positives. Tempting.
Oh they will ALL be first born kids. ALL of them. People with at least one do not have the time or privacy to have another. They also know the fuck better.
I have heard that the lack of pollution is saving lives. As is the fact there are far fewer drunk drivers cuz all the bars are closed.
These are strange times.
Feminina:
Yeah, I heard less drunk driving, and fewer sports-related accidents. Though I also heard that, oddly, there are not that many fewer car accidents in general, because apparently people are driving recklessly because the roads are so empty now. Wide open spaces! Time to go fast!
Strange times indeed.
Butch:
Huh. Weird.
Everything is weird.
At least I have toilet paper.
This WILL end at some point, right?
Feminina:
It will. It has to.
This isn’t a viable approach for human society in the long term, so logic dictates it will end.
Logic. And booze. We must cling to them.
Butch:
Well….here’s something about games. An unexpected thing about games.
PS had a big ol’ sale, and Nugget likes sports games, and we have a billion hours of free time, so I got him NBA2K20. This is a basketball game. The game play is….wait for it…basketball.
Remember many moons go when I made the claim that Madden could be construed as an RPG? Sorta?
Well, this game has a “my career” mode where you are a basketball player from college through your career.
“So what?” you say. You assume this is playing basketball and collecting stats and all that. I thought that, too.
Until I was watching Nugget play…and hitting a TWENTY MINUTE cinematic cutscene. I mean, CINEMATIC. Turns out yes, you are a basketball player. You’re in college, the captain, three months from graduation. You care about social issues. Your friend gets hurt, loses his scholarship, which makes you mad, so you sit out of the second game of the NCAA tournament and get death threats and there’s social commentary, man. SOCIAL. COMMENTARY.
TWENTY DAMN MINUTES OF CINEMA! With a customizeable character!
Did I mention it’s starring Rosario Dawson as your thesis advisor and IDRIS FUCKING ELBA as your coach?
Like….WHAT?
This is an annual installment of a fucking basketball game.
I dunno, man. I’m kinda into that. Maybe it’ll make the sports gamer set interested in story games.
Seriously. I was watching all “Is that Idris Elba? No way that’s Idris Elba.” But I checked imdb and it’s Idris Elba.
NBA game.
Strange times, indeed.
Feminina:
Idris Elba? Rosario Dawson? Social commentary?
Damn, NBA2K. Way to step it up with narrative and themes. I mean, I’m still not going to play it, but…way to go being more complex than I expected.
Butch:
Dude, seriously. It was the longest cutscene I’ve ever seen. Multiple locations, obviously big sets, facial capture, focus pulls, different camera angles….it was like watching a damn movie. It really did have shit to say.
But then…it was jarring. There was all this amazing cutscene, then, right coming out of it…no gameplay. A big, incomprehensible chart where you had skill points to spend an all sorts of shit and BOOM you’re back in a stat heavy sports game.
So….I’m pretty sure we’re not the target audience. If we are, they’re going to be very disappointed. So I wonder what they were thinking in terms of pleasing whoever they thought their target audience is. This cutscene alone must have cost a damn fortune, and it was only the very beginning of the story. I can’t imagine people who buy a game because they want to play basketball were too keen on sitting through a twenty minute cutscene, Idris Elba or no, before they could play more basketball. Nugget certainly wasn’t too keen. I was watching it, sure, but he was all “What is this? What’s going on?” impatiently waiting to play fucking basketball.
I dunno. Maybe I’m snobbily judging people who play sports games.
Feminina:
It is an interesting decision. A 20-minute cutscene is a bold choice in ANY game, let alone one focused on playing a sport.
And I don’t know if it’s even a matter of snobbery, to say “probably people who buy sports games buy them for the sports instead of the narrative.”
On the other hand, I suppose, just as we buy adventure games for the adventuring but also like the sense of getting to play/know a character, there’s no reason someone who’s playing the entire career of an athlete wouldn’t be buying it for the basketball but also enjoying the sense of getting to play and know the character of the athlete. That makes perfect sense. I might not be buying it FOR the story, I’m buying it for basketball, but I still like to know the person I’m spending all this time with.
We’re probably more likely than the average person to play something specifically for the story rather than for the sport, combat or whatever the primary game mechanic is, but even in our case, that’s not all we’re after. And even we’d be a bit startled by a 20-minute cutscene.
I mean, we comment when we get those cutscene-but-here’s-an-action-so-you’re-still-playing bits in some games.
Very interesting choice for basketball.
Butch:
Very interesting choice. I wish that, just for today, I was a fan of sports games so I could tell if I was annoyed or not.
Though…and I don’t know if this makes it make more sense or less, it was in an optional mode. You could just pick “Play now,” and poof, you pick an NBA team and off you go, or you could pick the mode where you draft your own team out of real NBA players, etc. So if you just turned it on and wanted to be the Celtics and play ball, you could. You can. It isn’t like, say, TLOU where you HAVE to watch that to play anything.
So, on one hand, maybe including it makes sense because you won’t really alienate the part of your audience that wants to pretend they’re the Celtics and play ball because they won’t see it. On the other hand, you’re making a scene (and probably more to come) that must’ve cost twelve metric tons of money knowing a chunk, if not a majority, of your customer base a) won’t see it and b) doesn’t WANT to see it.
It was quite a surprise to see.
Feminina:
It’s interesting, and hard to say much about given my complete lack of experience with sports games. Is this really unusual? Sort of unusual? Totally commonplace?
We’d have to recruit a sports-game-player to weigh in.
Butch:
I’d say totally unusual. I am not a sports game person, but the one thing Nugget plays almost as much as minecraft is sports. He has played a Madden game, MLB the Show (that would be baseball), the latest hockey one (played the HELL out of that), now this. The career one in hockey was just “make your face, pick your name, play a lot of hockey.” Progression through your “career” was just text and stats.
There certainly wasn’t any Idris Elba.
Feminina:
I’m happy to designate Nugget our Sports Game Correspondent. Much happier than I would be to have to play any sports games myself.
Even if they ALL had Idris Elba.
Play First. Talk Later. 
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