Merus

Right, ten minutes of digging through Wikipedia's bullshit got me this: The flickr image is not the same size as the uploaded image, so their automatic 'read flickr and check its license' bot went 'these aren't the same images'. Someone went to have a look at it manually and noticed that Blambo's flickr account has only one image, which is indicative of someone uploading something to Flickr to try and scrub copyright from an image. So there is a note on the page now saying 'contact us and prove that the actual creator exists, and released this account under creative commons'. In terms of petty miserable bullshit, this feels to me like garden-variety conflict between allowing people to upload anything they want and the general internet believing copyright should only apply to Sonic the Hedgehog original characters. There's probably a joke to make about the irony of Steve being hit by this that I'd follow through on if I were more of a dick. edit: the solution: Blambo needs to email permissions-commons@wikimedia.org with the following text: I hereby affirm that I, Ray Chen, the creator and/or sole owner of the exclusive copyright of [sPECIFY THE WORK HERE - describe the work to be released in detail, attach the work to the email, or give the URL of the work if online] I agree to publish that work under the free license "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported". I acknowledge that by doing so I grant anyone the right to use the work in a commercial product or otherwise, and to modify it according to their needs, provided that they abide by the terms of the license and any other applicable laws. I am aware that this agreement is not limited to Wikipedia or related sites. I am aware that I always retain copyright of my work, and retain the right to be attributed in accordance with the license chosen. Modifications others make to the work will not be claimed to have been made by me. I acknowledge that I cannot withdraw this agreement, and that the content may or may not be kept permanently on a Wikimedia project. [sENDER'S NAME AND DETAILS (to allow future verification of authenticity)] [sENDER'S AUTHORITY (Are you the copyright-holder, director, appointed representative of, etc.)] [DATE]

Here's the thing, though: most of the MMOs that I thought worked have had game mechanics that foster co-operation. As I mentioned, Pyroto Mountain had a mechanic where the maximum level was determined by a formula that took into account the distribution of players, and earning the right to advance involved participating on the mountain's BBS, with a post of substantial length, that had few spelling and grammar errors, to please The Spirit of the Land. As a new player, you couldn't afford to piss off the powerful wizards; as a powerful wizard, you couldn't afford to let one dipstick ruin your mountain for everyone else, or else they'd move and you'd be prevented from advancing. To get off land in Puzzle Pirates, you had to get on a ship, which usually meant you had to charm someone enough to join a crew. Because crew members could join any crew ship at logon and kick off one of the computer players keeping you afloat, you basically had to ensure everyone you recruited meeted a minimum standard of decency. As a result, the most committed Puzzle Pirates players were all basically socially adept, because you couldn't really get anywhere without it. Guild Wars 2 allows anyone to revive anyone else - basically every new player runs across another player's corpse, get them back on their feet, and have that other player thank them. Most players seem to credit that one mechanic with making the map chat significantly friendlier and mature than the average internet community, even though the official forums are still basically awful. From there, you can have ridiculously large fights and collaborative puzzle solving and having strangers pull you out of fires and all that other stuff that you only really get in a game populated with mostly strangers.

Anyway, welcome to all the new listeners, you came at possibly the most excellent time.

GW2's World vs World might be what you're looking for in terms of large scale PvP, including the avoidance of shitty pay2win mechanics. This is a game that has a cash shop and an official method to buy gold, but do not be fooled: gold lubricates some things, but the way you win in WvW is to get all your guys to the right place first. One guy with all the power buffs you can buy is still going to be steamrolled if he's there on his own. But having played a lot of MMOs, particularly the weirder indie ones, I'd violently disagree with the idea that they have nothing to offer that a single-player game can't do better. I've played an MMO where the progress of the brightest stars in the game depended on their ability to recruit and support newer players. I stalked in-game celebrities and employees for autographs. I've been in cold wars between two rival factions that wanted the same resources and just couldn't get on. I've seen developers drop new areas in unannounced, and been part of the discussions of people working out what it all meant. I've seen an entire map of 100+ people cheer each other on as they've been brought up to bat against a boss, 5 at a time, where everyone had to succeed for anyone to get the rewards. Single-player games, by and large, can't do community. A good MMO builds its game around it. If you're just looking at WoW and its clones then yeah, MMORPGs look moribund and worthless, but what you need to remember was that Blizzard redefined that genre to be a single-player RPG with other people, with sketchy, decades old mechanics meant for a text-based game run in a part-time university server. It's just now that we're seeing serious efforts to redefine it back, with games like DayZ. Making a follow-the-leader game doesn't work in MMORPGs because you're directly competing against the leader and offering a product that's smaller, jankier and more expensive; it especially doesn't work now that what MMOs used to offer is matched by Call of Duty multiplayer. So yeah basically ESO is as doomed as TOR was, which also made a follow-the-leader game and then was surprised when it turned out people had already played that game enough.

Man, I really didn't see the appeal of Headlander. It feels like a game in love with its core concept, but that game needs way more than its core concept to be interesting. There are lots of games where you take control of enemies and use them to do things.

Yeah, my feeling is that it's definitely the best of the fourth-gen MMORPGs, but then I'd also argue that there's only five of those actually out*. It has its jankiness, but it has a pretty clear identity and their design has improved very quickly. Re: Fallen London - they disabled posting from the game a while ago to distance themselves from social games. I don't mind their energy mechanic too much, especially now that it's 20 actions instead of 10, because most complete storylines take about ten actions or so, so when you check in now you can pretty much get a complete storyline or at least a healthy chunk of progress. Like, it's still an energy system, and I understand the desire to have a pacing mechanic but having a hard cap on actions is such a blunt way of doing it.

okay, super, I guess. Let me elaborate: the chief mechanic of the game is a dice roll on one of your qualities. The higher the quality, the more likely you are to succeed. If you succeed, a bar associated with that quality fills a little, and it increments when that bar fills. When you begin, you have frequently unlocked storylines at every new quality milestone, so while you're grinding on the same few stories, you see new ones every so often. Different stories give different kinds of items, so you start seeking around to find out which storyline gives you the items you want most. As your qualities rise, it takes longer and longer to get to each new milestone, and the storylines start thinning out. The area from around 40 to around 90 is particularly brutal, because at that point it starts unlocking storylines that advance by you selecting an option to grind on from a list to fill a progress quality. These were more interesting when the dice rolls had a tighter range, as each option started out being very risky and became increasingly more likely. It's at that point that the game most resembles a faster-paced Cow Clicker.

I kind of see this and Flappy Bird as two sides of the same problem: the mobile market is huge, so it's taking a lot longer for the people who spend money there to develop taste, like we saw in other 'casual' markets like Facebook and casual match-3 games. The big problem with making a game that assumes your audience can't spot your bullshit is that all it takes is for one game that doesn't have that bullshit to come along. I'd like to think Flappy Bird, which is a very simplistic game that also didn't implement any F2P bullshit, might inspire some of the audience to get a little suspicious of games that prompt them to spend money to have another go.

I thought the most notable thing about this show was that it had a pretty good staff, and that one year they rickrolled the Thanksgiving Day parade, with Rick Astley.

Or wait for Sunless Sea, which takes all the stuff that's great out of Fallen London - the writing, the setting, the clever approach to interactive storytelling - and puts it in a game with much better mechanics. Fallen London is kind of a slog until you get through to the newer stuff. Thankfully, I have an account that got through to the newer stuff so I get to see it.

I hear bird noises outs- *sniper shot*

I think that's true of most things, though: many, if not most, arguments are rationalisations of a gut reaction.

I wrote in! But then I had opinions and sent like a page full of thoughts on MMOs and unique experiences and another game called Fallen London that does super-rare events pretty well and then like two stories from that game I thought the Thumbs would like.

I have never been in a position to believe that girls did not play video games. I don't have any sisters, but like every friend I've had growing up played games at least a little bit, and I made female friends. My social group is half women and most of them play games. The online games I've played generally had fairly even gender splits. My mum got addicted to Boulderdash apparently. It's like black people and fried chicken; who doesn't like fried chicken? Except for vegetarians and strange people.

Hell, I would have thought that Mike Krahulik would have disproved John Gabriel's Great Internet Fuckwad Theory. Anonymity is not necessary, lack of consequences is.

I have two, because I have wildly divergent tastes: A nautical clockpunk dockworking game, where you have to swap crates between perpetually spinning crane wheels to get them to the right ship, and on the right hook. Success gets you money, which you can use to improve your wharf (or have on hand to pay out compensation for damages). You have a reputation with the shipping companies you deal with, and you can recruit new shipping companies with bigger wheels by demonstrating your quality as a stevedore. This one, I think, needs the most time prototyping because I suspect it will need a lot of polishing to expose the fun bit. A relentlessly cynical tycoon game about game development. You have a staff of developers filled with mostly rank amateurs (because they will work for long hours at terrible pay) and a few old hands that never had to do the bullshit work and so never burnt out. They make a game, which involves various 'systems' you hook together, which would encompass everything from gameplay to themes to the art style. Components can only be added if a team member knows them already, or they can be researched so long as the publisher is patient. Polishing each component costs time, depending on the skills of your team, and can introduce flaws, such as bugs, imbalances, and misogyny, that you have to spend time fixing (or ignore! because if your audience will tolerate the flaws that's more time to work on other things). Eventually you release it, and it is judged and sold - the simulation is weighted towards 'gamers' being unpleasable jackasses. You would also get news feeds from parody news sites like Ogamo to try and stay ahead of the zeitgeist, and be able to recruit 'rockstars' who are caricatures and combinations of known developers. You would have the choice of different funding models - a publisher, who would bail you out when you get in trouble but would also be a pain about everything you do; indie developers, who have basically no money but also no way to convince people their game is great other than an unusual art style and either gimmicky or nostalgic mechanics; or crowdsourcing, who have the pitch model of publishers and the funding model of indies.

TV recommendations, eh? Series 3 of Rake (the Australian dramedy, not the apparently forgettable US remake) starts up shortly. The first two series are a compact 8 episodes each. It's certainly sillier than most antihero TV shows, but that larrikin nature is part of its charm.

I am sympathetic to the idea of capturing more of the demand curve - it's fairer on the low end for people to get a pretty okay game for free, and people in the mid-range to get something pretty great on the high end. In practice, it's fraught with danger. For instance, it feels unfair to lock out mechanics to those who can afford to pay, but if the free game is super great than people who could have afforded to pay but don't get away without paying their fair share. The higher end of the demand curve tends not to be taken up by the very wealthy, but by people who you've addicted who can't afford to pay you what they're paying you. Honestly I think the only time you should really be trying for F2P mechanics is if your free portion improves by network effects, and your paid portion serves as a 'prestige' mode. Like if DrawSomething had a 'beat the devs' single-player mode you paid money for.

Lua seems to be a favourite, and Ruby is gaining some traction, as it's basically a much improved Lisp. C++ is usually the go-to language for lower-level, efficient stuff. The most important thing is that many of these languages are very similar to each other in practice, and that there's very little opportunity cost to learning one language over another - in fact it can be a benefit. Languages have their own ways of doing things, and programmers who only know one language tend to wield it like a hammer. Don't get too hung up on which language to learn - most AAA games, and many indie games, are built with a C++ backend for high efficiency and a frontend in the team's favourite high-end language. As an amateur, you probably don't need C++.

The thing that gets me about Fastpass is that, based on the one time I went to Disneyland, the optimal strategy appears to be to head immediately for the back of the park, not stopping for anything, no matter how exciting it seems. No. Everyone else is going to peel off for their favourite delight, and it will take them at least an hour to get to where you are. By the time the queues start getting ridiculous, have lunch, then start at the front of the park, where everyone's already done. So you really only need Fastpasses for a two or three hour window anyway. Maybe we got lucky, but we saw pretty much everything in a day.

I am honour bound to support Amy Rose getting an actual personality, but yeah Sonic Cycle in full effect.

Someone set us up the bomb When it Cold, rain freezes in the air and ice crystals Again's not here but I'll leave a message for them

Glad someone posted that so I wouldn't have to!

Usually the big selling point of the 'nice' one is that it's the official one - because the people willing to shell out serious money for the nice one are going to be far more compelled to buy the one that's been blessed by the creators, and with one 'officially approved by the creators' mark you've just ensured that it's the one that counts. (False advertising laws still exist.) I'd doubt that people would, in practice, make nice non-official copies because it's essentially paying a premium for a pirate version - not without modifications, at any rate. I would contend that the hazard of big companies lifting creative works, changing them just enough that it's not outright theft and then selling them already happens. Copyright did not prevent PopCap, Zynga and King.com from lifting games others had created, rethemeing them, adding on their signature design quirks and then reselling them. Moreover, I'd also contend that copyright does not, in general, prevent any sort of unwelcome reappropriation except when big corporations are the owners. There are countless examples of big corporations stealing content from smaller creators, who can't afford to sue and for whom suing is unlikely to recoup their costs. There's also quite a few examples of small creators lifting material, and they usually get in financial trouble only when they lift from a big fish. A law that, in practice, mostly allows only big corporations to profit is usually rent seeking.

This whole copyright thing is still going, thanks to John Walker trolling all over the internets again. Honestly I think my position is that the moral right of the author to be identified as such and copyright are two fundamentally different things; moral right of authorship is, I think, something that deserves the full weight of the law behind it. Copyright, though... honestly I'm not sure I support copyright at all any more. If we take the extreme position - get rid of copyright entirely - what happens? Well, we know: Germany established a copyright law a century after England and decades after France, and the market naturally congealed into a two-tier system: cheaply produced copies of basically everything, and then nicely printed, high quality 'official' versions. That honestly sounds not that different to today, with the ease of piracy thanks to the Internet: the 'cheap' version is The Pirate Bay, and the 'official' version is the special edition box set. We already live in a world where copyright is close to meaningless, and the surest route to making money while harnessing the internet is to have the most passionate fans pay to support you. There is an abundance of creativity in the world - we hardly have to promote or subsidise the creation of art, all that's required is an audience. In this world, no-one's going to make very much money as the lack of gatekeepers will inspire a race to the bottom, because it's so hard to cut through that you basically have to offer everything for free, and only the already affluent can afford wasting time like that. But then, this isn't much of a step back from where we are, where only a very few hits win and the majority of creators need a day job. We can make very reasonable assumptions about what that world would look like, and it's hardly a disaster. Honestly it feels like 2002 a bit. So our initial premise - that abolishing copyright is an extreme position - is fundamentally flawed. If it's not obvious that copyright is necessary, then the question becomes: are the benefits enough to outweigh the harm? To what extent is it a vehicle for rentseeking? Does it still make sense?