Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Poker Night 2!

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.

Congratulations Figure of Speech!

As the words leave the mouth of a young girl three timezones away, your form will shift.  Your chest will begin to contract, your head and shoulders will dive into themselves and your face will vanish into a torrent of flesh cascading upwards.  Your voice will vanish and be replaced by a shrill "meow."

It'll be telling that your live in girlfriend's response, rather than terror, will be exasperation.

"Again?"

You'll nod, a gesture that, now that you've taken on the form of a cat's esophagus and larynx, will just look like a worm dancing.  Your girlfriend will throw the remote controller at you from across the room.  Without hands to defend yourself with, it'll strike you in a newly formed tender spot called "anywhere on your body."  Life as the cat's meow will be a collection of agonies, of raw sensitive nerves firing simultaneously.

As your girlfriend shouts at you to just pay to have the gypsy woman's car fixed and settle the whole thing you'll try to shout something back at her about the principle of the thing, but a muted mewling will be all that comes out of your mouth.  A part of you, a deep, shame-filled part of you filled with ideas you force down inside yourself, will know that she's right.

Congratulations Figure of Speech!

Congratulations Denny's Sex Den Ringleader Wunderkind!

It's been a long time coming.  You started at the bottom, greeting people at the door and setting them up with tables while your uncle ran around back and expedited tickets.  You spent a staggering eight months there before your uncle decided to make you junior manager of the night shift.  After that you spent most of your time talking to customers on the phone and trying to fingerbang the wait staff in your office during what you called "development meetings."  You missed more than you hit, but you got a reputation as "a person who can competently speak to vendors and someone who is amenable to cocaine being sold in his kitchen as long as he gets a handjob from somebody before the night is over," and that was enough to get you promoted when the dealers you let set up shop in the back planted drugs in your superior's car to get him fired.

With the night shift under your thumb, you expanded your drug empire to include prostitution and impromptu sex shows.  You'd hire local teens to blow lonely old pensioners and to fuck in the meat locker for small audiences of beparkaed married couples who felt the spark had gone out of their relationship.  After around ten months of that, a teen eventually ran to the cops after a john roughed her up something good, and your uncle took the fall since, technically, you were 16 when you were first hired and, as such, were not of the age of majority at the time of your arrest.  That left his position vacant and you waiting there with your resume, a long list of recommendations from him and a police report written mostly by your man on the inside that left out most of the details of your involvement as the defacto ring leader of a Denny's based drug empire and sex club.  You were promptly hired as the general manager of the Denny's.

You begin work in your new position today.

Step one will be getting on the phone to your people on the inside, so that you can arrange to have your uncle killed.  You don't expect him to blab, but you can't trust him not to absolutely, and there's no room for error in this.  You've got to be sure.  After that, you'll do a bump of cocaine and announce to the staff that they'll now, along with Denny's menus, be handing out special handwritten "Denny's Nights" menus.  These menus will mostly list drug products and sex acts available for sale.  If anyone has any questions, you'll inform them, they should come to your office and blow you.

Silence will greet your announcement.  Many of the people working the day shift will have worked the night shift with you at some point.  Many of them will have requested to be transferred to the day shift to avoid your violent tendencies and sustained sexual harassment.  A handful of them won't know you at all.  They'll simply look puzzled.  Fear will gleam in the others' eyes.

Let them fear you.  Let them doubt you.  This is your Denny's.  You're king here.  Until someone bigger or badder comes calling, or until corporate sends an inspector to make sure your franchise isn't violating any bylaws, you run this chain family restaurant establishment.

Congratulations Denny's Sex Den Ringleader Wunderkind!

Congratulations Wonderful Fountain!

"Fucking fatass."

The woman will turn around, eyes wild, searching for whoever spat the invective at her.  She'll see nothing: just you, burbling and bubbling away while she stands there, ice cream melting over her hand, frown spreading across her face.  She'll approach your surface and toss a handful of coins in, which will leave you with a pleasant sensation, as if a dozen tinny fingers are massaging the substance of your being, your not-body.

As she continues to look around you'll suppress your laughter, just barely.  If people found out you were a sentient fountain that just randomly insulted people, they'd probably pull you out of the ground and stick you in a laboratory, which would be awful.  It would be very difficult to look up teenaged girls' skirts in a laboratory.

Congratulations Wonderful Fountain!

Congratulations Obamacare!

Today you're a term for a healthcare plan that most people don't seem to understand and people seem to really dislike.

"THANKS OBAMACARE!" a man will shout at you from his computer as he fails to log into the healthcare exchange of a state that refused to allocate resources to the production of its website.

"I know, right?  WORST PRESIDENT IN HISTORY!" a man next to him will shout at the ceiling.

"FOX NEWS!" a third woman will shout.

You'll insubstantially float about, wondering just what the shit is going on while people lambast you.  For the most part, you'll just feel hellishly confused, but every once in a while someone somewhere will actually use your name in some sort of relevant context to your existence, and in these brief moments, your awareness, your consistency as a concept, will flare.

"I guess Obamacare isn't terrible once you actually get through the initial hassle," a young woman in Kentucky will announce to her computer.

"I guess I don't have to deal with Obamacare at all," a young man in Alaska will announce to his screen after learning that his receipt of health insurance through his employer disqualifies him from receiving care under the Affordable Care Act.

"Obamacare done taught me that maybe all black folk ain't so bad," an oddly progressive minded young man from Houston will announce to his computer after learning that his girlfriend's lupus will no longer disqualify her from coverage under his health insurance plan.

These statements will occupy the minority of your awareness or existence or whatever it is that you have as an insubstantial term that sort of just exists in the aether of the world, but they will serve as concretions of a sort, fixing agents that will allow you to understand the texture of your own existence.  This mix of vitriol and passive acceptance, this notion that people hate you until they get to know you a little, will be odd, but it will be an existence of a sort, and since existence is the only thing you're insubstantially aware of, it'll be a good thing, more or less.

Enjoy the new year, you strange, miunderstood, insubstantial term you.

Congratulations Obamacare!