gregbrown

The first episode is actually more interesting than the trailer made it look—but primarily because the only real pivotal, this-is-something-we're-actually-doing-to-build-the-website scene is presumably pitching Electronic Arts to give them access for coverage. Which is kind of expected and pragmatic, but also kind of... unsettling?

On the outside, actually.

This is the main one, I think. The formatting kind of bit the dust in the last re-design, but it should still be readable. http://www.shacknews...online-spy-game

That Quora crane game answer: http://www.quora.com...swer/Zach-Baker Thanks for answering the Polygon question! I didn't get into it in the question (in the interest of keeping it short), but political journalism has followed the same arc, where politicians have pretty astutely figured out reporters' needs such as the access to get good quotes quickly, and use them to turn reporters into stenographers. There are some other elements at play, of course—a crippling addiction to horse-race narratives, obsession with finding contradictions rather than questioning premises, etc.—but the effect is largely the same: the reporting apparatus has in a significant sense been captured and is now simply used by those who it was intended to report on. I ended up touching some on it in the Polygon thread elsewhere on Idle Thumbs, but there's that expected pace that absolutely cripples online tech and game reporting, in that you have to be talking about everything that's happening now. It's probably even best described as sort of a Prisoner's Dilemma: gaming journalism and most gaming sites would be far better off if everyone was off covering their own stuff and writing about different interesting things, but the easiest model for most readers to understand is gaming news—and once there's one gaming news site, the way the next site finds a place for itself is reporting the same news even faster. It ends up being this all-sucking attention vacuum that results in dozens of sites all reiterating the same material: some of them faster or more popular than others, but all of them generally going over the same stuff. (And now we are getting another one, which—if The Verge is any guide—will distinguish itself from more pictures and more video content. And, I guess, a sponsored documentary.) Like you guys said, Rock Paper Shotgun is one of the few exceptions: a site that does report some gaming news, but also manages to reflect on what's happened in a model other than a game review with a numerical score. (Even their reviews are excellent!) I'm amazed that it exists, and I can't expect any other sites to go down that road because there's really very little pressure from readers to break away from the traditional model. And no pressure from any of the monied interests, either.

I made a thing about the new Madden.

When it's called out like that, it's usually higher-contrast colors (or at least, contrasting in a way that'll show up if color-blind). That said, things like the Bejeweled fix are often not called out and end up helping everyone. To see what something looks like color-blind, you can use this Chromatic Vision Simulator iOS app. It is pretty cool to just wander around and look at stuff under the different kinds of color-blindness.

I'm hoping that higher-DPI screens will start the trend of developers realizing that they need to control for this kind of stuff, because it's starting to show on some laptop screens too. Hopefully they'll generalize their solution so that you can turn it on for lower-DPI monitors too.

This was the biggest surprise to me while seeing it in theaters. I started wildly gesticulating and none of my friends knew why.

Yeah, the whole film is undeniably layered under pop film trappings—but it manages to undo a lot of your expectations about those trappings too. You'd expect Taylor Kitsch's character to come save Brooklyn Decker, but it never happens. One of the main characters also happens to be the most straightforward acknowledgement of the Iraq War in any film I've seen recently. The signal broadcast sequences are almost a parody what we expect to see out of NASA/film visualizations. The trailers way overplay how much Liam Neeson is actually in the film. Vulture compiled every line Rihanna said in Battleship and it's pretty great.

This is 100% accurate and throughout the film, the aliens give every indication that they're just trying to contact home. It's this great subversion of Bay expectations because there's a big destruction scene, but only because their communications ship hits a satellite on the way in because we have so much space junk. So they've landed in the ocean, not knowing what to do, and their only goal throughout the film is call home and protect themselves while doing so. Even that horn scene is great because it's this twisted callback to the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film is brilliant and I'm getting re-excited all over again. I pre-gamed it, but as I got more sober I started realizing that it was actually going to be a really good film and it was a thrilling experience to go through that emotional shift.

I would strongly disagree here. Reporting on daily news may be a good short-term plan—and possibly the only model that can currently sustain the kinds of large staff and traffic they want—but if you pursue that, you're delivering a commodity and you're going to get beat some day. You may be able to hedge against that somewhat by delivering longer-form content right next to it, but your core model is just asking to be upset by the next site down the line. Magazines got upset by gaming sites, which in turn got upset by network sites (Gawker Media, AOL Tech, and Vox Media in the form of Kotaku, Joystiq, and Polygon). All three of those tiers are still around, but only because the audience for gaming has exploded, meaning that there are many more eyeballs to fight over at the moment. When it stops expanding—as it will when you start running out of people to convert—those publications are going to run into trouble. I think you're also muddying the difference between artistic criticism and negative criticism. I'm not saying that the gaming press has to hate on every game—or even dial back what the publishers want them to say. I'm saying that they should be examining games carefully and not just following the typical flow right now. Rock Paper Shotgun does a really good job of stepping back and editorializing about different elements in games, or making arguments that can at least be discussed meaningfully other than saying "oh graphics were good" or "oh game was fun". Podcasts also seem to be a good way in which the existing sites are branching out into more thoughtful content—just because of the way that the medium works. Most sites simply don't, or they bury it under a bunch of bread-n'-butter content that communicates the exact opposite values.

It's always been planned as a separate site, but you're right that they set up shop at theverge.com/gaming to get into the swing of things while the design/tech is built—similar to how The Verge published at "This is my Next" for a few months last summer before launching.

The Verge is a kind of frustrating example of exactly those tendencies to me, though. When The Verge came out, I expected it to be pretty good: the number of people involved, combined with the care they took in the presentation, even gave me hope that it would be something more. That with more than enough people and talent to cover the daily news coming out of the industry, they'd get restless and start doing something new. Free themselves from having to post 7-14 news posts each day and instead work on properly reporting out the news instead of just paraphrasing it. But instead, they've stayed largely the same; outside of the occasional excellent feature and well-produced video reviews, they are if anything moving towards more click-baiting bullshit. Maybe I should have been more cynical from the start, but The Verge has guaranteed that I'll have the same misgivings about Polygon when it comes out. And do we need another gaming site of record, that trumpets and gladly transcribes any new piece of gaming information while still marching in lockstep with a publisher's media rollout? I really don't think so, and the only way to break out of that cycle that I can see is to take the news out of the gaming news site and simply focus on good coverage. John Walker's take is a pretty great read, and thanks for that.

It really is amazing: the best movie I've seen in 2012*. It really is what you'd get if you took the core premise of Battleship to be essentially: that the other side is unknowable, and your attempts to communicate and combat often little more than shots in the dark. It's certainly the best treatment of first contact that I've seen in quite a long time, and Berg never really gives you a good reason to think the aliens are the aggressors. The trailers play up its similarity to Transformers, but I found it to be very different and very much better. *Granted, all it's beat out so far is The Avengers, Prometheus, and Batman.

They're all working for me right now in Chrome. Edit: Man, I am watching the streams right now (was in and out with errands last weekend), and they are stressing me out! The ghost zombie in the castle was so freaky.

Disgrace would be really great for discussion. I found it really unsettling and am unsure how to feel about it.

I love how once TF2 came out, game art became noticeably more "Oh, silhouettes are important!"

He's going to be sad he missed his chance to title a game "Curiosity: Rising".

Given that the Gamasutra interviews and project updates are essentially "my failure has re-confirmed my existing opinions about things," I would have very little faith that his simulation wouldn't just be a polemic for his views on how to deal with climate change.

Sorry, I should have explained it. (I wrote like three or four versions of that post before finally submitting it so totally my fault.) "Gamer" used to be a way to give a group identity to people who were traditionally marginalized within larger groups. It came about at a time where few people played video games, and they were typically thought to be nerds, kids, etc. But now that more people play video games than don't, it seems that "gamer" is used as a way to disqualify people. Women may play more video games, but they don't play the "right kind of video games" to qualify. Casual and Facebook games—up until people started getting legitimately worried about Zynga's status as drug-dealer—used to be denigrated purely on that alone. The Wii is another system treated as not for real gamers. Is that clearer, or am I seeing phenomena that aren't really there in the larger community? I come at it from the perspective of having spent time in the Shacknews forums, which is now an increasingly-aging group of people who grew up with PCs and have reluctantly made the transition to consoles.

As an aside, it's also important to note that when we're talking about "video games" being misogynist, we're referring to "video games played by self-identified 'gamers'". Throwing in casual and iOS and non-traditional games makes the picture considerably more positive, if only because those games are pulling in a much more diverse audience. Do you guys think that self-identifying as "gamers" is more a tool of inclusion or exclusion today? It used to be inclusion, but these days I'm not so sure.

Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington teach you English. I cried at Ricky's impression near the end.

The Girlfriend Mode conversation was superb. Like you guys mentioned, so much of the time a freak instance gets outsized attention while the larger context gets ignored completely. (To make a shitty analogy to this week's controversy, it's similar to the incredible attention paid to Akin's quote compared to examination of the actual RNC 2012 platform.) It must be so strange for that developer because I'm sure he's said many things beforehand that are equally worrying, but he didn't get a reaction those times so it became implicitly safe. And then people start freaking out about it randomly and thus the surprise. We really need to do a better job of critiquing some of the same tendencies when they show up in a less overt or sound-byte form. Would that a fraction of that backlash have been levied at Duke Nukem Forever, which deserved it infinitely more for its misogyny. Jake's The Thing analogy is totally awesome. Essentially, a big statement like this really highlights who finds it a big deal and people who find it no big deal. That allows you to really find out who is operating under the same assumptions as the speaker, especially when they're pretty tied to a lot of the culture. Fun fact from The Thing: If you watch, they actually used the puppet for the last AND the next-to-last test, so that you wouldn't recognize it as a prosthetic because you'd already seen it during a normal test. Also the John Carpenter / Kurt Russell commentary is awesome because they just drink and reminisce.

The timer doesn't start until the first person signals they're ready, but I don't think it's affected after that.

Have you tried the kritzkreig? I've heard it's pretty handy. Roles in MvM seem more dependent on the equipment choices than the regular game, if only because it's much more one-dimensional so a lot of the regular game "tradeoffs" aren't really tradeoffs. For example, the Brass Beast is clearly a better weapon than the stock minigun because you care much more about damage than mobility.