Merus

That's weird, because I think base Thunderstone is pretty good. I've had the same experience with Mansions of Madness; a keeper win feels like a damp squib, I think partly because it's often fairly sudden. Does the keeper have a way to fulfil their objective? Only the keeper knows on any one turn.

This is a very provocative series of essays (this is the last one, and the other two are linked within) on the game industry as it stands today, ostensibly triggered by the game Problem Attic, but mostly not. Among the ideas in here is that Twitter has a vested interest in Anita Sarkeesian being attacked, that Apple and Steam benefit from their stores not being discoverable, and how The Design of Everyday Things is used to train players to avoid exploring a system.

I'm kind of over trinity mechanics, because I think the trinity's a poor way of doing class interaction, but if you're going to have a tank, this is a clever way of doing it. What exactly is the "endgame" of Destiny? What are people supposed to do once they're through the story mode?

There is a lot of truth to that, but our table took a while to understand that because there's lots of victory point resources from things other than quests that we were misled into thinking they were good sources of VPs and not a little bonus for letting yourself be distracted from finishing quests.

Also it'd be good if that thing was a minute shorter but the same amount of frames.

That is not a shot that I look at and think, 'yes, this is going to be a fun or smart movie'.

Lords of Waterdeep is pretty great, although I think that the dominant strategy is to complete quests. But even when everyone at the table understands that's the way to win, it's still a lot of fun.

...I was under the impression Internet Explorer wasn't as shit any more, at least IE10.

There's a balance here. Okay, so the two Bartle types that are relevant here are Achievers and Killers. Achievers want to win and be the best - assert their superiority over the system - and Killers want to troll or beat other players - assert their superiority over the players. (There's some conflation here that later research picked up on, and these are tendencies more than strict boxes, but as a model for player behaviour it still has value.) I haven't played Payday, but I'd guess from your description that there's no PvP, that contact with the community is optional, and that people who fiddle-arse around or try things just to see what happens aren't widely appreciated. Payday 2, from your description, sounds like it's an Achiever-focused game, as it's a co-op game against a system. Compare to Destiny, which has required contact with the community, and likely has a bigger PvP component (including, I'm guessing, the 'endgame'). That provides opportunities for players who want to assert their superiority over other players, Killer players, which should drive up the amount of trolling and general fuckery you see in the game. That will drive away the people who want to experience other players - Socialisers - which is a pretty well-known aspect of MMO social dynamics. There's some big assumptions here, chief among them that Bungie has any interest in keeping players in the world. If the whole idea is that players play through it, and then quit, then an in-game community won't really form. My stance here is resting on the idea that there's going to be an in-game community; if not, and six months out it's only supposed to be you and your friends and maybe you'll see some strangers, then the whole argument comes crashing down and a dance emote is probably fine.

I just typed a big thing saying that /dance serves a specific purpose as a social activity! And that Destiny probably isn't going to be a game for people looking to do social activities! And that's what bothers me, it doesn't feel like Bungie really thought about the kinds of players they're going for, which means there's going to be lots of disappointed people who buy it to play a fun co-op shooter you can play with friends and strangers, and then when the Bartle types kick in and there's only dicks playing it there'll be lots of people who'll have a shitty experience that Bungie could have controlled for if they'd thought about what kinds of players they were going for. And Bungie have done this before with Halo 2, and it ruined Xbox Live.

So finally finished Ace Attorney 5. My attention wandered enough while playing it that I put it down for months, and decided to come back to it to clear away some of the backlog. It suffers from the same problems the other Ace Attorney games have, to a greater extent; there are a couple of surprises, but it's clear that it's More Ace Attorney rather than being Better Ace Attorney. The writing likes to undermine the attorneys at every opportunity, even when the player can see an option the attorneys can't. The gimmicks from previous games return, and they're gimmicks, although the emotional detection does get more interesting than the 'tell' perception ever did when you're looking for emotions that are absent, or that are consistent. Still, I think the multiple witness gimmick from Layton vs Wright is worth expanding on because it genuinely changes how the core mechanic works. I'm also a little bothered by some of the themes - you out a transgender student in one case, and while I think the translation covered for it as best it could, it bothered me, and I know a friend of mine quit right there. The overarching culprit turns out to be a clearly American spy, and between this game, Ghost Trick, and Ace Attorney Investigations, there's been an almost xenophobic reliance on hostile foreign agents from Capcom's recent adventure game output. ★★☆

That's my point though, I don't think the userbase of an MMOFPS actually does enjoy socialising with strangers, which is what non-combat emotes like dance and sit are for. Part of the fun of an MMOFPS is shooting real people in the face, and there's a long history of research showing that the two groups - people who socialise with strangers, and people who like shooting strangers in the face - don't stick around for long in the same game if they're constantly running up against each other. It sounds reductive when expressed like that, but it's a well-known design principle for MMOs called the Bartle player types. The Bartle research suggests there's only three stable distributions of player interest: pure socialisation, PvP-focused, where players who want to fight other players, and those who want to be the best, and evenly distributed, where there's a strong core of theorycrafting and exploration-focused players to offset the player-killing types. If Destiny is going to be successful, it's going to go for one of these three distributions, or else it'll bleed players. It seems pretty unlikely they're going for the glorified chatroom option. Bungie have a lot of fans who are looking forward to their next PvP experience, so I'd bet, with no knowledge, that what keeps people playing will be some kind of PvP. If that's the case, people whose main attraction to an online game is hanging out with random people are going to get discouraged by the trolling and go-go-go guys, and leave. If Bungie plan on doing regular co-op content drops then that changes things, but I'd also suggest that they've lost their collective minds. Wave and point do make sense, though, even when most players have voice chat.

I cannot believe this game has emotes. Tell me this game doesn't have emotes. I cannot think of a bigger waste of money than putting emotes into an MMOFPS.

===PAUSE DOTA TALK=== I found Chris' experiences with Destiny fascinating. I've been watching MMOs for a long time, as there's such a gulf between the fantasy of them and the reality, and it's interesting to see what they look like from the outside. It's weird to me that Bungie built a straight-up sixth-gen MMO, complete with public events and heavy instancing for story content (and dancing emotes! why would you put dancing emotes in an MMOFPS for fuck's sake, it's not like you're going to get a strong roleplaying community), when they probably would have been better served either deviating from the design, or looking more carefully at their antecedents. For instance, many games do level scaling so everyone's at the right expected level, within an expected power range; some games build loot so that the stat distributions are all the same proportions so you don't have that incremental thing. But I also remember that ArenaNet junked levels entirely in the early alpha of Guild Wars 2 and players hated it - the idea of vertical progression and numbers going up is very appealing to some people, because it plays into a power fantasy that because they've beat this game now they can kill everything in one hit. It sounds like it's a mess in Destiny - you can at least make it manageable by putting in level scaling and locking gear into 'tiers' where each item in the tier has the same stat budget - but Activision want their new MMO now that World of Warcraft is past its prime. ===RESUME DOTA TALK===

Yeah, people have been expecting to hear about the Failbetter collaboration for a while (every new IP BioWare announces until the Failbetter one will have people asking if this is the Failbetter collaboration). Some of the imagery in the trailer screams their brand of horror. The writing sure doesn't! I'm hoping that's the marketing department. A live-action trailer would also make sense if it's a Failbetter collaboration because Failbetter's strength is in words. If you are going to do a collaboration with Failbetter, it is going to be a very wordy game and that suggests a mood trailer. There's a lot of coincidences here between Failbetter's movements and BioWare's movements; the most telling one, to me, is Failbetter announced the BioWare collaboration at the same time as BioWare filing a trademark for 'Shadow Realms', widely believed to be the name of the game. Also, the existence of an ARG (that looks fairly detailed) is deeply suspicious to me, because from what I remember BioWare doesn't really do ARGs, and Failbetter fuckin' loves them.

For games like that, I find myself increasingly uninterested in following all the possibilities because going down a branch I haven't been down is inevitably going to lead to first dying, and then having to replay the whole thing again to get back to a choice I hadn't taken. The Stanley Parable at least made it worthwhile: it didn't take long to get back to the branches, and then you got several minutes of unique content that had its own themes and a clear voice. I enjoyed it, but I didn't bother going down more than a few branches.

It was called Anub'rekhan in the original WoW dungeon where the noobs had been long since filtered out, although it was usually the first boss people took on... wouldn't put it past them.

I don't think I want the Thumbs as social media friends, because it's a very one-sided relationship. They would be my friend in the same way that Lady GaGa would be my friend - Chris, or Jake, or Danielle, wouldn't be interested to see what I'm playing, wouldn't get a thrill of recognition or satisfaction in seeing my avatar, we almost certainly wouldn't shoot the shit or play a multiplayer game together. If the only reason to have them on my friends list is to pretend we have a relationship, what's the point? Also one of the Thumbs eats babies, I have rock-solid info but no names, and I don't want that on my friends list.

Reading through Problem Machine's post to ensure I'm understanding his argument, it sounds like what he's arguing that people should do is what people have been arguing at Problem Machine that people should do. So I'm glad we've found some common ground here! For instance, I don't think anyone actually disagrees with this line, but what got people's hackles up was the idea that you go to B without going through A.

From what I remember, there have been plenty of instances of men passing as women and women passing as men, as writers and as gamers, and the experiences are fairly consistent: people who appear to be women have to deal with a lot of shit that people who appear to be men don't. I think this conversation clarified a question I had a few pages back about people playing the race card over the application of regular policy: ask what the racism is. Same with a woman saying that it's sexist: just ask for more details. The problem's that we avoid that conversation instead of having it so much that everyone is on the same page, that we internalised golliwogs and the pink aisle without anyone saying 'yo, this isn't right' alongside of it.

I'm not seeing the Rhem games on that list.

All along, we have been so blind: BigDog was a Pokemon the whole time.

'Fair dinkum' is honest, both in speech and when referring to work done (less common: 'dinky di'); when objecting to being misled, you protest 'don't come the raw prawn (with me)'; someone who is acting irrationally has kangaroos in the top paddock, among many colourful idioms essentially meaning that there's a piece missing from the whole - beer short of a six-pack, a chop short of a barbie. etc, creativity is encouraged; 'you've got Buckley's' means 'no chance', occasionally expressed as 'you've got two chances: none and Buckley's'; 'Woop Woop' is a very remote town, and 'out the back of Woop Woop' even more remote; if you freeze, or confused, you're 'like a stunned mullet'; to do dirty, hard work is 'to do hard yakka'. We also have many expressions for saying someone is stupid, but then doesn't everyone. My favourites are 'couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel' and 'couldn't find a grand piano in a one-room house'.

So here's a bit of 90s Australia: Frontline, which is now officially up on YouTube because literally everyone in Australia except for TV station owners understands internet video now. Frontline's a satirical look behind a trashy 'current affairs' program, with the usual brief of celebrity puff pieces, shonky tradespeople, terrible reporting, chequebook journalism, titillation in the name of reporting, completely irresponsible takes on the day's news, terrible reporting, bullying interviews, hit pieces on other stations' tentpole shows, and terrible reporting. It was fairly directly inspired by Drop the Dead Donkey, although because it was more about terrible journalism than about the news of the week, and terrible journalism is eternal, it aged much better than Drop the Dead Donkey did. Sadly, it is still relevant - The Desert Angel plays out every few years in America, I'm pretty sure - although the 'celebrities' are pretty dated at this point and likely won't make sense to non-Australian viewers (which might make the joke even funnier, really). It is on the school curriculum in Australia, so its immortality is basically assured.

Of interest: he mentions the ECA brand ambassador announcement as being the trigger here. Here's a story from VentureBeat talking about it. Some broken links there but judging from the Googles I'm guessing that he was pretty shitty when he first started and this came when he'd improved some (I note that the 'Hot Girls in Gaming' series doesn't seem to be a thing any more). There's some fun questions about intersectionality and how easily past transgressions are forgiven for white people to be asked here that I am going to step wellllll back from because I know I'm not very good with racism at all.