Merus

I suspect cost is going to be the big issue - the Xbone is already seen by console players to be too expensive, and if a Steam Machine that's comparable to the PS4 is more expensive than both the PS4 and the Xbone there'll be a lot of questions raised over whether the whole exercise is worth it.

Aw, I wasn't done with the defence force fitness requirements! Because let me assure you, the defence force thinks long and hard about exactly what their requirements are and what are reasonable and unreasonable expectations from its personnel. It is, in a very real sense, their core function. What they have found is that, in an age where melee combat is incredibly uncommon and bombs are significantly more deadly than weapon fire, raw strength is less important, and less likely to save lives, than it was assumed. So long as they're able to perform the requirements of their job, and they have the endurance required to be effective, this is sufficient. Apropos of the defence forces, . It certainly informed my own personal feminism: the standard you walk by is the standard you accept. Which is why it's a little bit bullshit to be deathly concerned over how women only play three sets of tennis when men play five, but not, say, the massive international network of sex slavery, or the systemic dehumanisation of rape victims (who are usually, but not always, women) in favour of those accused, and even convicted, of rape (who are usually, but not always, men). The standard you walk by is the standard you accept, and the claim that women hold privileges over men is to walk past the overwhelming evidence that this is not the case.

I have no problem with creators privileging the users who come through for them in a time of need. I am also sort of annoyed at the idea that a game can be compared to a book. A game is a piece of software. If you never manage to get to the end boss stages, do they exist? You can't flip forward and see them like you can with a book. Those stages don't exist unless they have a player to play them - what exists in the game code are instructions for building the stage when there is a player present. But if you don't press a key, if Beck never moves, that stage still doesn't exist. It's only in the act of playing it that it becomes real. Or take Cookie Clicker - at what point does one have The Full Experience of Cookie Clicker? That line is different for everyone, and we all find everyone else's line either insufficient or insane. We cannot, objectively, declare one set of experiences to be The Full Experience, and decrying its absence is churlish because you can't possibly have The Full Experience anyway. For Mighty No. 9 in particular, part of the experience is trusting in Inafune's team and participating in the development of the game. If you did not back the Kickstarter, you are not getting The Full Experience of Mighty No. 9 because part of the experience will be complete by the time you buy the game. Why privilege a level over your participation in development? If the retail version is still an experience the creators regard as 'complete', isn't this sufficient? (Of course, the very minute the implication is made by the developers that the game is not 'complete' without a particular piece of extra content, I'm no longer charitable.) Besides, you could always buy a used copy of the Kickstarter edition off someone.

Yeah, half this stuff is unexamined privilege and the other half is the lingering effects of the patriarchy. Easy one first: the chief way feminism benefits men is that both men and women are required to buy into the patriarchal idea of how men and women are. Women get the raw deal here because their role is much more limited, but while men get more freedom in what they're allowed to be, they're still in a gilded cage. When it comes to things like custody and relationships with children, men frequently get the raw end of the stick because what kind of man could possibly want to mother children? And the patriarchal notion of men as distant breadwinner and women as homemakers and protectors of children is reinforced. Feminism is opposed to the patriarchy, and demands both that men be both allowed and expected to take a greater share in the raising of children. Harder one last: you are coming at things from a perspective that has no real conception of what it's like for women (and maybe minorities? I don't know), and you are never challenged on your ignorance because your perspective is seen as the 'default'. On many issues, you don't get to be right, and you will have to learn to live with this. Specifically, you have no conception of the thousand little ways women are undermined and marginalised, things like rape culture, mansplaining, disenfranchisement. Things are not 'equal', and gender-blindness is an impossible goal. The important thing is to recognise and disentangle our perceptions of gender, which are cultural, from sex, which is physiological. Sports prizes are not based on physical fitness, but on prestige. This does not need to be based on physiological characteristics. Defence force fitness requirements are designed to ensure their troops are in peak physical fitness - they're arbitrary. The unequal requirements are there to compensate for women starting further back - a man meeting the women requirements is far less likely to be physically fit because of the natural advantages he has thanks to his physiology. Of course, the defence forces need people in peak physical condition, but they also need many other things, like discipline, leadership and accuracy, and it turns out that they're not gendered. The defence force is acknowledging that men and women are different in specific ways in order to ensure that they take best advantage of the assets they have. The reason why privilege is important is because until you realise you have it, and how it blinds you, feminism looks a lot like it's trying to disenfranchise you as a man. No-one is coming for your balls.

Oh, I haven't shared a traumatic dream I had recently. I dreamt the doctors told me there'd been complications. My organs were failing one by one, and there was nothing they could do other than alleviate the pain. I was keeping a list of what faculties I still had and crossing them off the list as they went, and they moved me from the ward into a small, quiet room that was clearly drawn from my memories of school sick bays. I could hear a loud-mouthed colleague from work outside saying something that was slightly unkind, and calling out 'I'm not dead yet'. I tried to move my hand, and it was interpreted as me calling in my mum, and my family shuffled in as my voice failed, then my sense of touch, then my hearing, then my sight, then my thoughts. And then I woke up.

I recognise some of the people in the audience!

I would strongly disagree that coercion in all cases involves the threat of physical force. Stockholm Syndrome is absolutely coercion, but it still exists when the threat of physical force is taken away. Blackmail frequently uses psychological threats to coerce the target - no physical threat is necessary if I show you embarrassing photographs and threaten to send them to the media. Friedman scoffs at the idea of brainwashing, which we know now was a real thing that genuinely existed in China at the time he was speaking, and it didn't require people to go to re-education camps to take root. I would agree, though, that coercion involves a threat. The Stockholm Syndrome sufferer is still feeling psychologically threatened after an intense physical threat. The cult member has been conditioned to feel threatened by outsiders. The slave is operating under a threat and any deals made while under that threat are coercive regardless of what they are.

I got what I wanted out of Riddick but I did not want very much from it (I wanted: something that sort of reminded me of Pitch Black) and it probably wasn't up to the task of anything more. Yeah, it was weirdly sexist and the idea of having a hero that you then turn into a slasher movie villain briefly is not especially effective considering it's basically what the fourth movie in a slasher franchise ends up doing to itself and people generally don't enjoy those. I saw it for gift vouchers, so I am not particularly disappointed. Farscape is probably fourth, maybe fifth, on my list of TV shows to watch. I have a pact with my housemate: The Wire first, then Breaking Bad. I want to watch Babylon 5 because he has it and speaks highly of it, and we have similar taste, but Farscape probably after that because it's an Australian sci-fi show that worked and I haven't seen it all yet. (I suspect the bits where they take Australian bush and paint some of it blue doesn't seem quite so alien to me as it would to foreigners.)

Basically I freak out every time Curiosity finds something. I was staring at the pictures it sent back for like 5 minutes, aware that I was looking at a place that no human has ever been, an actual alien world, and the enormity that I could see something like that moments after its capture, lit up on a screen on the shoreline of Australia. And the first person I tried to share it with said 'it's a bunch of rocks'. WATER ON MARRRRRRRRRRRRRS

I think you should re-consider Fez. You don't want to think very hard, and Fez is quite a pleasant platformer, and once you've gotten all 32 cubes you'll be wanting something a bit more cerebral, and Fez will have your back there, too.

The clicks aren't just when you press down on it. If there's a range on the disc that's being used as a button, it can click when you put your thumb on it. Apparently Valve are considering modifying the feel of the disc to make this work even better, but the disc actually works as a series of buttons. That's what people are missing, I think - the ABXY buttons are peripheral, and all the haptic talk is to say that they've solved the smartphone button problem by simulating feeling where the buttons are. Guys, you know I'm ready to bitch about Valve at the slightest provocation, but the one thing I know is that if Valve do a big announcement like this it means they've already subjected it to tons and tons of actual people playing actual games. They've already tried it on Dota, and we know they flew in a bunch of developers to test it out as well. I guess I'm once again being contrarian but I looked at the controller announcement and trusted that Valve knew, in this specific instance, what they were doing. There is so much smart stuff announced over the past week: streaming to a TV from another PC, the creation of a hardware category with reference designs that people are free to deviate from, albeit at their peril, having community-sourced controller configs for games that don't support the controller, that, in the unlikely event this thing crashes and burns, will make for a game industry that's just a little bit better than it was last week. (I guess it also answers my ongoing question of 'what the fuck have Valve been doing with their hundred or so very smart people and essentially unlimited resources' because they just announced an OS, a hardware product category and a revolutionary controller design in a week.) Mark my words, Origin will be working on SteamOS sooner or later. That's the beauty of it: the Steam universe is simple enough for regular joes who just want to play a game, it's an all-encompassing solution, but Valve can't lock everyone into Steam and SteamOS because it's Linux-based so they won't be able to abuse their tremendous power. It's the 3DO/one console vision, except this'll actually work.

Finished Rayman Legends. It's splendid - I think the WiiU version probably made people overlook it, but it's a gorgeous game with a lot of charm. It is an Ubisoft game, so it naturally has stealth levels, but they put it and basically all the other common video game tropes in one world so it's bonkers, and left the rest to be things like a Day of the Dead world where you cut through gigantic cakes. Anyway, that stealth world has playable spy princesses so it's automatically the best.

Aaaaaand the creepy guy won.

Voted today! While it's not exactly an inspiring choice this year, I look at the ballot and all the minor parties and how a 'personality-focused campaign' these days means that we kind of already have come to agreement on a lot of policies and I think we could have it so much worse as a democracy.

Like you, I wouldn't play this at all but I dearly wish it existed. I'm tempted to pledge and then take the lowest reward level.

I'm a bit ambivalent about Mega Man (most of my attempts to get into the series involved going into 'the wrong level' and getting stomped by the boss) but I'm also ambivalent about this. Wasn't the whole idea of Comcept that they could finally pursue new ideas?

Considering it was built for people to upload pictures and post them on reddit I suspect they already know.

I don't know, I think there are advantages to consumers: it means games are made that wouldn't be because it's easier to sustain yourself on the backs of a small group of passionate players, and games that are successful have a business case to provide players with free updates. Minecraft is the perennial example; I ran across it a few times, and the first few times I saw it, it was pretty lame. It took a while to find the fun of that game, something that maybe it wouldn't have had the resources to find if it relied on making a big impact upon release. Or take Psychonauts, which failed at retail because it was too weird. Word of mouth is what sold that game. The hit-driven model is terrible for games like Psychonauts, so you need another model that allows the game to build a head of steam on it. The long tail model is possibly good for consumers but discoverability is a real problem, which is basically equivalent to the hit-driven model in that games aren't finding success relative to their merit. Or take Guild Wars 2, which is patching every two weeks pretty much because they can. The implication is that players are going to be paying subscription fees for basic functionality and then nickle and dimed to death, but when a developer does it right then the standards are raised for everyone else.

Valve have been saying this for a while, and I suspect other developers think this as well. Everybody's eyeing Blizzard jealously with their games that have absurdly long shelf-lifes and massive post-release revenue. I mean Starcraft and Diablo II here. WoW monetises that shit but so do all their other games. And then Notch went and did it with a game that wasn't even complete! Getting early adopters to help you fund the development of the actual game is like manna from heaven for developers that are forced to release half-finished games because the money ran out. The days of releasing a single, complete product, to then drown on store shelves and disappear entirely after three months, is one most developers want to bury as soon as possible. Certainly, some companies are in it for the DLC moolah but there's perfectly innocent reasons to want to kill the full package boxed product.

I'm not very far in, mission five or so, playing on normal with permadeath on because I'm not stellar at strategy games but I want a 'real' Fire Emblem experience. Should I just restart?

And you would be correct, Candy Crush Saga is a cleverly disguised pay-to-win game. I do like the timed extra lives mechanic, though, in a better game where skill was much more important it'd provide delicious tension without having to do a lot of balance work.

Well it's supposed to be feedback, but the feedback is basically 300 words that boil down to variations on 'it sucks'. It could be about anything, and it would be equally meaningless. I prefer my bilious insults to provide some truth. I did a quick word swap to see what it looked like with another subject: American Idol is a shape-shifting, chimeric shadow of suffering and despair, a cruel joke perpetrated upon honest men and women at the brutish whim of bloodthirsty sociopaths sick with bilious greed and absent mercy or decency. Watching American Idol is picking out the wallpaper for one's own death row holding cell, the cleaver for one's own blood sacrifice. Like the catcall of "whore" or "crook," American Idol passes judgement before you even turned it on. American Idol is the relief promised under the pressure of thumbscrews. If you were innocent, why did you start watching American Idol in the first place? Watching American Idol is punishing oneself for the corporeal scars of abuse. Maybe it's me, maybe it's me, American Idol fans whisper quietly, alone, every Tuesday, before heaving the deep, lumbering sighs of resignation beyond sorrow. I don't know about you, but that feels like it fits pretty well, which suggests that none of those sentences need the Facebook Platform in there to communicate their intent. So it's an elaborate way to say 'it sucks', and frankly I don't feel the need to applaud excessive verbiage considering that I can elongate my elocutions sufficiently well that others' efforts are not impressive. Compare that to an extract from Bogost's followup: Facebook is special in [its indifference to developers], because its outward claims toward "connecting people" are so poetically at odds with its actual business of extracting value and attention from them at all costs. Facebook is like a kindergarten run by child molesters. Cutting, super mean and funny, but it says something specific about the Facebook platform.

You know, that's pretty spiteful but it's not actually that insightful. If you took out the nice language basically what it's saying is 'it sucks really bad'. I didn't really see why everyone thought it was that clever.

Except they're still in business, so they clearly can't be mostly about turning a profit. AAA games are some of the most expensive entertainment products to make, comparable to tentpole blockbuster movies, and unlike them only a few million people pony up for them. They need to bleed these fuckers dry to even have a chance of making another one. You cannot afford to be a AAA development studio and be all about the art, because you simply cannot afford to alienate any of your audience enough for them to not consent to being bled dry.

A lot of the industry scuttlebutt seems to be that Valve have basically given up on single-player narrative-driven games in favour of games that can serve as platforms for players to entertain each other and create content for.