Henroid

It was really bound to happen, I was hoping that Disney would've breathed new life into it. But I forgot they're into licensing properties more than internally developing. A peer of mine elsewhere wrote (via twitter):

Just started listening but I wanted to say, congrats Jake!

I hear Richard Hofmeier won at the IGF! And then he decided he didn't need any publicity anymore and gave it to Porpentine: Edit - Oh I guess there was a straight up GDC 2013 thread that's not a meetup thread. My bad.

Hey!

If you get SimCity 4 (Delux) get the NAM mod for it. It adds a lot of road tools in a very clunky manner, but you don't need to use all that shit; it allows you to build more varied road designs just by regular drag and dropping (mostly when crossing route types like avenues over/under highways), but more importantly it improves the AI for traffic routing. So you can skip all the clunky crap added in. But yeah SimCity 4 is amazing.

Okay because your first response made me feel really, really bad. Anyway I beat Castlevania, the NES one, for the first time a few days ago. The furthest I'd ever gotten as a kid (when I was better at video games) was Death, the stage prior to fighting Dracula. I watch Game Grumps and saw Jontron beat the game, and considering how hard of a time he had with stuff I considered easy I decided to man up and just do it (plus I felt challenged at that point; if he can do it, I should be able to). My first death was right after fighting, uh, Death, being knocked into a pit by a giant bat. And then I had to continue once during my attempts at Dracula. But hey that was a kickass record for me because I used to die a lot on stages 3 and 4. I also beat the Frankenstein boss without taking any hits from him or the invulnerable fleaman. So all in all it was very satisfying.

Oh no wait he's just roleplaying what he's doing in competitive online games.

Nick is just the bottled-up eventual-serial-killer of the show. He mutters in anger, he threatens his friends over imagined slights.

I call it, "the right way to play Mechwarrior."

Chances are I suck at reading, it happens sometimes.

Well that's the very nature of what it means to be disappointed doesn't it? Disappointment comes with expectations of doing better. I was glad to hear the discussion on SimCity this time around because it felt like they were trying to avoid being negative last week.

It felt like you guys were arguing two different things (which you said in a later post here). I think Jake was commenting on the perspective of the LoMa communities as a whole, and you were commenting on your personal engagements and explaining yourself rather than comment on the big picture. I get what you're saying about intent of aggressive commentary and how it's just a result of the tension, but I guess I want to know why the tension is so high. Why it has to be so high. As much as people say that the matches are long I just can't buy that as a reason for some reason. It makes me loop back to taking things more seriously than they should. Tension in video games has existed for longer than LoMas, and something about LoMas has transformed it into something unhealthy I feel. And I really don't want the answer to be the mechanics of the game because we get into how video games actually do negatively impact people (a long philosophical discussion). I think the answer is in how the communities shaped these games and the way they are "meant" to be played. I played DotA ages ago before these became individual games. The guy who brought me and people from our community into it was very much that kind of personality, berating us and generally being an asshole, even in our first match. And most people we encountered in these games were like that. It actually reached a point where we got banned from a couple circles in the grand DotA community (there was a plugin that somehow allowed this over Battle.net) because we were "noobs." We barely got chances to try and improve our know-how with the game. So I guess I'm in on this whole conversation with a heavy bias of having been a 'victim' of the ugly side of this kind of game. One thing you were sort of getting to is something I agree with though - when you're amongst friends, you get more relaxed about how you speak and there's general understood context there (like saying, "FUCK GET BACK" among friends is different than among strangers). Edit - By the way I'm totally cool if this results in "agree to disagree" because there's some fundamental differences that may not come down to 'right and wrong.' I just dig sharing views and trying to understand things.

I disagree with this. Yeah, sometimes playing a game competitively will expose behaviors of your friend(s) that you never knew before. If you're willing to say a new grievance is worth ending a friendship over without attempts to work through that grievance, well, I'm not exactly sure what to say to that. I've definitely run into instances of my friends doing despicable things when we play games, but I'm willing to apply that newfound negative aspect to the event that triggered it. For example, when one of my friends picks Pikachu in Smash Bros. I know exactly what to expect from him and will compartmentalize that frustration and anger to the time we are playing. Also "ruin friendships" is generally hyperbole to talk about how angry people get at one another over something. If something is actually 'ruining friendships' regularly by its very design, is the game healthy to play?

That's a totally fair point about what a mistake could mean down the line. But how that mistake is communicated and handled is in what's in question here. I don't mind tight team coordination being a path of success, but that should be the mark of a great team. When it becomes the barrier of entry to a game I have a real big problem with it. People are essentially demanding others play in specific manners. I don't jive with that at all. In the few guilds I'd been a part of in WoW, they all had more relaxed approaches to the end-game - you play however you want, all the guild cared about was you doing it well and being an asset when needed. I don't bring that up to compare the gameplay of WoW to LOMAs, I'm trying to compare the approach people have with newer players or players who may not be that invested in success. Which isn't to say people aren't interested in success, but does it really require the coordinated dance that LOMA players seem to demand? It's like there's an unspoken, "Why are you playing this if you don't care as much as I do" when it comes to the shit I see/hear people say to others when playing these games. Also throwaway joke: LOMAs are less of a sport and more of ballet. I have a question for Sean - you told Jake that the behavior isn't about picking on others, it's an aggressive communication. It kinda bothered me when you said that because you made it sound like it's the norm and completely acceptable. The question is, does it have to be aggressive? Which is a silly question but I'm asking it to maybe get some perspective about your own investment in the game. You recognize you're starting to bite into the negative behavior that surrounds these games, and instead of questioning it by any means you seemed to be justifying it.

Oh, well shit, listening to the discussion again Sean actually flat out says there's something mechanical about the game that makes people what they are when playing it. I really, really disagree. I think people are managing frustration with loss, even casually, way too poorly.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. People don't sit down with CS, hear the first "Counter Terrorists win" announcement in 2 minutes, and go, "Ah, that was a nice session of Counter-Strike!" and walk away. They sit down and continually engage it over and over. The rounds in Counter-Strike are akin to each outing from your base in LOMAs, only the latter lacks any formalized returning of everyone to their home for a few seconds to regroup and try again. It would be better to draw the comparison to map changing after whatever parameters are in place on a CS server (be it by rounds won or timer). And sure, even then CS still ultimately adds up to overall less time invested, but again I never really saw people join for a map's worth of play and bow out. Two, three maps, then out. At any rate, the point about team play may be the case here, in which case I fault the very nature of the design of LOMAs. Which is something I'd hate to do because then the awful behavior of people online was created by the developers, whether it was their intention or not. I'd rather say people are at fault for their own behavior within a culture. Even with a more team-centric play system in LOMAs, it didn't have to come with, to quote Jake to his dismay probably, "SHUTTHEFUCKUPGAGAGAGAGA."

By the way, the LOMA discussion about competitiveness, I'm very much of the same sort of mindset that Jake is with those games. Competitiveness in video games is not new. When I ran around in Counter-Strike ten years ago, if I fucked up I wasn't getting chewed out like this game was the main event. There were exhibition matches (which was playing whenever) and then clan matches that were very regulated on who could play and spectate. People were able to parse out the competitive behavior from playing for the sake of playing. In DotA and LoL there is a heavy atmosphere where every match is a competitive match (and I mean the negative kind of competitive). Why didn't these communities foster an establishment with exhibition matches and clan matches?

Wrapping up on the last few minutes of the podcast still but I wanted to note this. I was playing SimCity 4 while listening (how appropriate), and I just got my first skyscraper. Not just for this one city I've been playing, I mean out of all the times I've played the game (which is very off and on over the last couple years). And hearing you guys talk about the new SimCity has me thinking that it sounds pretty effortless, that you cannot 'fail,' that you will always be rewarded with a big bustlin' city. Meanwhile in SC4 this is like the 50th city I've started ever (fifth in this region I'm playing) and I really had to work at it. Maybe I'm just bad at the game. But I'd rather have it the hard way than just handed to me. That's tip toeing toward some 'casual vs. hardcore' video game player crap which isn't my intent.

AW man. I was hoping the file size was indicative of the episode length, and then just totally had my expectations crushed when Winamp said it's just 82 minutes.

I'm disappointed that I can't find video of drunk guy who fights for montage winners.

I hesitate to say I've completed Etrian Odyssey 4. I completed the story arc of the game, but as with the three titles previous there is a 'post-game' that is pretty difficult, and I think this takes the cake. And it's not necessarily stuff you can just out-level. Basically every random encounter is boss-battle difficult and you can (and will, with great odds) be blind-sided by something that instant-kills people despite coming prepared.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a pretty good article about all the malarkey surrounding the game and the recent behavior on Maxis' part. It specifically brings the "it's an MMO!" crap into contention, which is something I've spent the last week trying to convince other people that it is not an MMO. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/16/simcity-bosss-straight-answers-seem-pretty-wiggly/#more-146003

Wouldn't that be a statement that the game developers aren't interested in this as a concept? I guess that's evident from few companies standing up for the OUYA going "oh us!"

Sorry to dig this thread up but something came up, via Gamasutra, that I think is related. Seems like Apple came up with their own solution for playing games on a bigger screen. Uh, and it's free (provided you have a receiver of some sort).

Nothing out of the ordinary.