Poker occupies a strange place in my heart. When I was in college, I'd occasionally play
poker games with friends. I'd take the
quiet attitude of "spending five dollars to hang out and shoot the shit
for a while," and I'd usually end up walking away with my money and then
some after a few hours of play. My
friends would take it further: they'd buy back in after getting knocked out of
the table, sometimes two, three times, throwing money at me. I once had to lose hands to try and make it
to a party somewhere else on campus. The
lesson was apparent: poker, at least Texas Hold 'Em poker, was a pretty easy
game. People, in general, were stupid
and overproud. If you play a simple game
calmly and in a collected way, you'll do okay.
If you let pride get the best of you, you'll lose the game and your
money and a little bit of that pride you're apparently so attached to along the
way.
The appeal of poker usually rested on the table game for
me. The game itself was always kind of
hum drum, but watching people, playing people, playing with people, that's
where the real fun was. Learning how to
read bombastic players, quiet players, constantly nervous players, that was the
challenge. The odds weren't too hard to
sort out, the game theory hardly complex.
It was the people that made it interesting. Why, then, is poker one of my favorite
mini-games?
The prospect of poker as a means of rolling up free money is
part of it, but each time I start playing a poker mini-game there's a period of
adjustment. I have to get a feel for the
system the game uses, how the AI responds to different patterns of behavior, if
and how the other players cheat. Any
game that presents poker as a means to acquire money will almost always present
an easier, quicker path to riches alongside it or before it. Some, like Fallout: New Vegas, go so far as to cap the amount you can earn
playing it. Poker is a great way to bump
up your wallet in New Vegas, but if
you make solid progress playing it, casinos will ban you. Far Cry
3, the most recent game to introduce a poker minigame to my life, has an
anemic system that scales overall table skill based stakes and, accordingly, has
a heavy "cheat curve" to it.
Paired with a monetary system that quickly becomes irrelevant (and isn't
difficult to bust out on in the course of regular play) there's really no
reason to play poker in Far Cry 3.
So maybe this isn't about my relationship with mini-game
poker. Maybe mini-game poker is okay,
fine even, but nothing incredible. Maybe
this is about why I spent my money on Poker
Night 2. To be fair, I grabbed it on
sale for a lean dollar. I made out like
a bandit over Steam's Holiday Sale, and I'm still pretty stoked about it. But a
dollar for a game that I can ostensibly play in a bunch of other games is still,
in a sense, a bit steep. I mean, I'm
paying to play a game I can already play.
What Poker Night,
as a series and a title, does that mini-games don't, and perhaps where
mini-games most frequently fail, is simulate a table game. What does that mean? That means that Poker Night (or at least, Poker
Night 2 - I assume the first title does this as well, but I've only played
the sequel) actually imbues other players with consistent personalities and
corresponding behavioral patterns. Brash
jerks act like brash jerks. Quiet
resourceful players act like quiet resourceful players. Inscrutable robots behave erratically. There's trash talk, unrelated talk, shit
shooting aplenty.
You could attribute quite a bit of credit to the writing,
which is solid, great even: Telltale knows how to write good dialogue, they
know how to make absurd things seem commonplace and commonplace things seem
absurd. Even the characters they're not
directly responsible for come through wonderfully, and I'd be surprised to hear
they didn't have some help from everyone except Doc Hammer in assembling their
band of miscreants (there's something just off enough about their rendering of
Brock Sampson, but not off enough to make me think that Jackson Public didn't
have some hand in his curation), but there's more to it than that.
Clever dialogue is all good and well, funny clever dialogue
even better, but what Poker Night
does that most poker games can't, won't, or simply don't do is simulate the way
actual players with actual personalities respond. These are players who get the game, who
understand how to play their hands and read your actions, but filter all of
that through a personality. Some players
are easier to bait than others. Some
players are tremendously cautious and, as such, bluff more effectively than
others. Even without tells (which the
game allows players to exacerbate by buying various characters drinks) you
develop a sense for how the various characters will respond. That's something no poker mini-game, not even
Fallout: New Vegas', has given me to
date.
The human aspect of the game, the portion of it that
actually resembles a game, is wonderfully alive in Poker Night. To say that's
tough to do is an understatement. In a
sense, it's a Turing prototype: Telltale has developed an engine for simulating
the behavior of poker players. It's not
perfect, and it's not terribly complex.
I've been puttering around with it for relatively little time (Steam clock
reads five hours, and I've left it on while I cook more than once) and I'm
already feeling like I've seen most of what Poker
Night 2 has to offer. But the achievement,
and the presence of an independent, thoroughly enjoyable and engaging poker
experience in my Steam library, is something to behold, well worth the dollar
buy in, and singularly noteworthy for the fact that it's one of the few games I
cannot play with a movie or a podcast on in the background. In Poker
Night 2, the table game requires my full attention.
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