Merus

Ha ha I bought tickets two days ago The show is on at Giant Dwarf, which seems promising: it's a venue the Chaser troupe purchased to do live performances at. It might be terrible, it might not, but they apparently asked former premier Bob Carr what his favourite game was and reportedly he answered Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon so I'm willing to give it a shot.

I always read this as deliberate: we're only shown him practising in that way after Fletcher's been established as a real piece of work. I'm honestly a little confused how many people read the movie as approving of what's going on - I'd almost say it was too subtle about its opinion of the consequences of Fletcher's beliefs, except that we get to hear Fletcher's beliefs after:

The worst thing? There's three fonts in the game and the other two are fine. It's not even 'their fonts are all over the place' (it's fun going back to Devil May Cry with an eye for fonts) but that someone who made really good choices in the UI department then made a really bad one.

So it seems that Campo Santo employs a graphic designer

I feel like it's a really hard thing to judge, honestly. There's a concept in psychology called 'flow', where if you manage to get in the sweet spot of ability and challenge of a task, you feel deep satisfaction. It's taught in game design courses, designers have known about it for a while. The problem is that ability doesn't change linearly, and increasing the challenge of a task isn't always linear either. For instance, Mario games would be much less interesting if instead of unique levels, they were repeated with minor tweaks to make them harder and harder. Keeping people in a state of flow is hard (assuming that's what you're trying to achieve with the game - there's good reasons for deliberately sabotaging that flow state, and I wouldn't be surprised if Hotline Miami 2 was trying for that) because you need to have a good idea of how the average player's competency will develop without the benefit of a statistically average player.

Calls for Nintendo to start doing mobile stuff is usually coupled with them abandoning handheld consoles. I'd imagine, given the timing and theme of the conference, that NX is a successor to the 3DS and not a Wii U replacement, which would make sense because the 3DS's lifecycle is definitely approaching its end. Nintendo desperately needed to outsource large parts of their online infrastructure. They're not good at it and they don't care enough about it to make it a priority. (There is a long list of things that Nintendo are bad at that they don't care about, and at least some of them - firmware, APIs - are things that hamstring their platforms.)

Yeah, the use of Verdana for the Tree's dialogue jumped out at me, it's bizarre. I'm not loving that the game has an XP system; I think one of the advantages of these kind of games is that items are discrete, so if you find an item, you always get a reward, and the only source of rewards is finding items. Having XP drop from enemies emphasises combat to an uncomfortable degree. It's disappointing because the game design is on point in so many other ways, including a lot of ways that other games in this genre mess up. The maps feel deliciously sprawling, with lots of one-way passages and shortcuts, and I'm not feeling that memory stress that many of these games induce where I know I'll have to come back here and here and here and here later and I'm trying to remember all that so I don't waste time poking about aimlessly later.

I'm going to defend Drive - it's a quiet movie, but it's incredibly well directed. The director communicates so much through shots and staging that words are unnecessary.

Well, no. This is why the link savaging white privilege classes is so important: if everyone in the world was aware, that means those who like things just the way they are would be aware, and they will have co-opted the argument while holding onto their power as tightly as ever. The problem is not the words, it's the violence they disguise. The well-known slur about black people is verboten for white people not because it's a naughty word, but it's a word white people say who are happy to kill black people they don't like. Not outing trans people is important because people will kill outed trans people.

Finished watching Season 2 of Korra. Ha ha wow that season is a mess. I totally understand why Nickelodeon left the series to die. I counted at least three deus ex machinas, and the big final battle they fucked up any sense of logic or cohesion to have completely wasted its premise.

I've seen metabattle, there's been some concern over whether the ratings are actually legitimate. I'm an engineer main, and Wolfineer's guides are stunningly comprehensive. Big patch today; mostly nice quality of life things (lots of camera options, some minor but satisfying UI tweaks, no longer take falling damage going down inclines), and a change to stability which will probably only affect WvW. Unlocking traits by completing events is actually really controversial - I like how it disconnects traits from stat increases, but I know I'm in the minority. In the expansion, apparently, trait unlocks are going away; big world events will give mastery points instead, which unlock new abilities that are then earned by XP. (Similarly, gaining skill points at max level is also going away.)

This seems to be a perennial, and unfounded, fear on the left. It seems like pushing through a law that works and is good makes it easier to advocate for further changes - maybe the law doesn't fully solve the problem, but now it's the law of the land it's much easier to argue that it should be built on rather than getting rid of it, causing a whole bunch of new problems, then replacing it with something unproven. If the Republicans try and smash Obamacare, for instance, there's going to be millions of furious people for whom the law solved their problem, even though you've also got the problem of hospitals not having any pressures to reduce prices so everything's way more expensive than it needs to be.

I kind of independently came to the conclusion that games should be using systems as much as possible, but I think where I disagree is that those systems should be set up to create stories, because humans think in stories and expecting them to enjoy or appreciate a system that does not generate stories is a fool's errand. Like, Dys4ia is basically a linear story that uses mechanics as illustration. It's not particularly systemic, but it makes its points by setting up a metaphorical system that you're primed by text to see in a certain way. Papers Please wouldn't be nearly as effective without the narrative events that force difficult decisions. They're not systemic - they happen on the same days for everyone, and they work because they put a human face on the decisions that are being made. In the early 2000s, the Experimental Gameplay Workshop performed an experiment where they reskinned a very systems-driven puzzle game with a simple context, and found players enjoyed it significantly more. It feels like Bogost is trying to have the narrative vs. systems fight over again, something that never really started (it was a misreading of well-intentioned academics reacting against well-intentioned film studies people using the same toolset for games) and is a dumb-ass fight anyway because a game that's just one or the other is going to be pretty fucking poor. Ludonarrative dissonance has fallen out of fashion as a critique because 1) it's a terrible name and 2) it's a critique that supposes it makes sense to examine theming stripped from the systems it describes, and that a game's mechanics can be entirely encapsulated in things which can be compared to other elements of the game. (For instance: the way information is presented to the player, the delay of registering button presses, whether animations are interruptible, all of these influence the feel of the game, yet no-one talks about ludokinesthetic dissonance, which tells you something about why only ludonarrative dissonance was a resonant critique.) I also note that Bogost's most successful game, by far, is the one with no mechanics and a cute cow.

Yeah, if money is a premium don't buy new. I've gotten really great couches for free because people just don't want the hassle of getting rid of them.

Feelin' pretty good about putting off getting into Adventure Time now.

Gareth Evans on Rogue One, not Edwards. More importantly: who is Gareth Evans' action choreographer and editor? Because his previous films work because the action choreography is whip-smart and the editing is fantastic, and if he makes a Hollywood Star Wars film and leaves this critical roles to the same guys everyone else uses, you're going to squander his talents.

So I think these posts by a guy named Fredrik deBoer are really interesting critiques of social justice as it's actually practiced: this one talks about 'critique drift', where the language used to describe problems becomes a shibboleth, and thus made meaningless; and this one, which criticises the idea of social justice activism being limited to 'raising awareness' and 'describing experiences' by asking how much of it is actually taking the fight to the enemy. This one I've linked in the Gamergate thread, but honestly it's the one that gets my hackles up most because it's condemning something I agree is pretty shoddy in ways that make me realise I'm not that far removed. I do get extraordinarily uncomfortable that we've got a very sizable Feminism thread on a forum that's overwhelmingly male, which implies that somewhere in there are pages and pages of men essentially patting themselves on the back for recognising that a system exists to privilege them and then assume that this means they have escaped its clutches. I've heard similar complaints about specific incidents before (for instance: Donald Sterling has been racist for years, but it took him actually saying racist words for it to be considered a problem) but I feel like this does a good job of actually identifying and describing a trend that's been floating around for years.

I stumbled across this guy, Fredrik deBoer, who has a really sensational critique of social justice as she is spoken that I'll drop in the appropriate thread, but I bring him up here because of this blog post discussing the private school white privilege classes that takes a side-swipe at Gamergate as it goes, specifically its ability to co-opt 'oppression' as a metaphor: essentially, they can do it because talk of oppression has become unmoored from actual harm.

I usually play around this time at night, although I'm trying to play earlier because sometimes I either don't go to bed at a reasonable hour, or I don't get to play at all.

The Wii U Pro Controller is one of the best controllers Nintendo's ever made, I think: it's just the right weight, the shape's perfect, the buttons are up to Nintendo's usual high standard and the battery life is insane.

Yeah, you absolutely have to cut the table talk for Hanabi to work. I think if I were you, next time, I'd pointedly stare at the person, flip over a fuse token, then say 'that's one'. If they don't get the hint, at least the game'll be over quickly.

So have I mentioned Hanabi? It's crazy: you're trying to build a set of five suits, laid on the table in ascending order. Problem is, everyone but you can see your cards. You hold them face backward. A turn consists of telling another player where their greens or their 5 or what have you are in their hand, giving them just enough information to go on, but not so much information that you blow your time resources. You get back time resources by discarding cards, but discarding cards is dangerous because there's only so many identical cards to go around and if you discard a 5, or too many of the lower cards, you can't win.

It's not a zero-sum game, but it usually seems that way in practice: Wonder Woman having pants usually doesn't mean an uptick in the writing quality, particularly because it tends to come out via a press release and not via the events of the book.

Personally, I'd far prefer the stories to be well-written and interesting than to focus on whether or not Wonder Woman gets pants. It's a very peculiar obsession over whether Wonder Woman is wearing pants that I'm not sure is anywhere near as important as people make it out to be.

Ow, losing Terry Pratchett hurts. Congratulations, tegan, I'm just going to be over here a little upset about death.