Eric

Can't wait to play what will undoubtedly be the best game ever made up to that point and what will without a doubt alter the landscape of video games forever

Each app took 40 people to make duh

I think that it is unfair to say that Valve is adding zero value, they are providing a market place and hosting. Sure that already exists already on other sites but ZeniMax is the rights holder and by law is able to determine how individuals are allowed to profit from their intellectual property. Is this the best or even a good system to govern media? Probably not. It's an expression of a thorny mix of essential issues with capitalism, intellectual property rights, and crowd sourcing. These are edifices that are good to critique but are pretty significant parts of today's society. http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/crowdsourcing-scam Here's a good article on labour and crowd sourcing in 2015 capitalism. Particularly it speaks about how the distributed nature of technology has facilitated a devaluation of real skilled labour. Where those who have earned rights through collective bargaining are being replaced by the rights-less and anonymous cloud. I don't know if people lost their jobs at Valve as they transitioned to a more community sourced content model for TF2, probably they were just moved to other teams and project. That said I think that there are serious concerns to be had about economies that turn the general population into decidedly underglorified contractors fighting over a growing amount of dollars held by fewer and fewer hands. Maybe in my Marxist fantasy where intellectual property rights don't enclose the media landscape into private spaces for capital accumulation there could be a system where people can make a mod and sell it for two bucks on their own website or whatever but it's pretty hard to convince a capitalist rights holder that that is a desirable thing.

The game itself seems like it was inspired by hacky 90s horror movies and tv shows in the first place

Canada's dirty little secret is that it is very nearly as shitty as the united states with regards to it being run as a racist police state by underhanded capitalists trying to cash in on running the entire world into the ground as fast as possible. That said, to everyone: vote. Please vote. Canada and the US are the same in that the majority of voters are old baby boomer assholes and, while many youth do vote, they are as you say apathetic and inconsistent. Whether or not your vote is a hail mary at best or at worse a shot at a lesser evil it is extremely important that you cast it. If you are young and/or a minority and don't vote politicians have absolutely zero reason to do anything for you or your demographic unless you have millions of dollars or some political will of your own. Please just fucking vote

There are a million sensory deprivation places popping up around here. My understanding of it is that you are set to float in salty (for the buoyancy) body temperature water that is in a sort of weird light and sound proof egg thing. So you kind of just float there without feeling, seeing, or hearing anything for 45 minutes or so and your skin gets really dry afterwards.

When Half-Life 2 came out I remember playing only until just after you meet Barney and you're about to go out on the roof tops. I had school the next day and I knew that to continue would mean that there was no going back

Your grandchildren giggle with amusement after you finish recounting the story of how you burnt out your retinas. How absurd that you would strap something to your head to jack in, they thought shortly before logging in themselves. With irises distorted into apple logos the children lie placid on the floor as clouds of sulphuric acid pass by the window. You sit there silently in darkness while they can see only light.

My name is Gato I have metal joints Beat me up and earn 15 silver points

Click everything onto everything else

It's ok if there is only one good fez

I don't agree that Mountain can not be considered minimalist just because the design doesn't express the aesthetic of other minimalist works (particularly from other mediums). I think as evidence from the discussion itt it's safe to say that there are a multitude of frameworks by which an object can be analyzed. Sure if you want to talk about Mountain as an extension of capital M Minimalism in the 60s and 70s it doesn't exactly fit in. But that minimalism was a reaction to a very different historical background and using a very different tool set than what Mountain has emerged from. If you want to talk about a game as a minimalist creation sure compare it to other works in other mediums but games come with their own history of design that should not be ignored. As an illustration of this consider something like pong which at least chronologically if not aesthetically fits in with the minimalism of the early 70s and is itself a distillation of table tennis. While Minimalist art at the time was taking hundreds of years of "technology" in the form of tools and technique and reducing it to its essential elements Pong was limited in its expression by technology. Now, more than 40 years later, almost anything expressible in traditional art can conceivably be expressed within a video game (though not without being passed through the lens of medium). Technology hasn't slowed for games either. Every day new hardware and software techniques are being developed to allow developers a broader tool set to inform their ideas. This is where minimalism can come in. Because games aren't traditional art, developers have the choice to express themselves minimally in a variety of different ways. You can make your game with simple aesthetics and gameplay (i would argue gameplay is a formal element of games as well as an aspect of its aesthetic but that's a different conversation all together) like pong or you can produce something new that speaks with the vernacular of modern games but only discusses it in small parts. This isn't exhaustive of course but I think of Mountain as an example of the latter. Another example of minimalism might be found in the demoscene where a product is created through the use of the most basic tools. A video game might be made in tens of kilobytes written primarily in assembly language. A framework by which Mountain can be observed that can be applied to any created thing is by distilling it to a series of decisions. Minimalist art can be observed this way. A series of lines on a canvas can be considered as thoughtfully (or not) placed just so and the result is an aesthetic product. In a game like mountain similar considerations must be made. Regardless of whether the intent of the author was to troll the games commentary community (arguably one of the easiest to troll yet) or not, Mountain had to be produced and decisions had to be made to get there. Maybe a measure of minimalism can be found in the number of decisions in a final product? If that was the case then games face a lot of buried considerations. For example whether the developer uses unity, unreal, or their own engine to produce a game can result in a widely different form of the final product. I won't speak too much more here but I will say one last thing: Almost any game can be used to do an analysis on the form of games. A game itself can use the "text" of the game (i.e. its own form) to confer a notion about it and other game/artwork. Any game can be used to make a relative judgement of the form of games as a whole. As such, I think the term "formalist game" is a bit misguided

Everyone makes jokes but I really enjoyed Ricochet

Checkout dat dick bulge

deep dive

Yeah Nick way to miss a great opportunity to directly reference 19th century french symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé on your video games podcast

Another side effect I've found that comes from being involved and interested in municipal politics is cynicism and a slowly growing dislike of urban processes and the people who control them. Maybe I'm just predisposed to that kind of thing though, ymmv

The best part of Gone Home for me is that it emulates some of my favourite things namely walking around, throwing objects onto the floor, and listening to the sound rain

Digging up landfills intensifies decomposition which exacerbates the release of stored carbon and that is not so nice for the environment. I think in general its probably better to keep that stuff buried unless they plan to do carbon remediation at the same time

Has there ever been a game/comic/whatever that talks about the almost certain major social inequities in Gotham City that has resulted in the armies of beefy disenfranchised young people that follow around super villains

And, rather unusually, Canada as well.

Highlighting words is awesome especially if you're talking about a Video Game or Relevant Theme in a forum thread

Hello I like to make weird cabins in the middle of nowhere may I have a whitelist? Also my name is fragnk

Prime reason why video games are art: Which do you think evokes more wistful thoughts, a painting of a simulated ocean or A REAL TIME SIMULATED OCEAN??