Merus

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Merus

  1. Posted

    I'm still not bothering to participate in this discussion, but mathematical taxonomy requires games to have at least two players. If it's just one player and rules that constrain their actions, it's a puzzle. It doesn't help that most single-player video games are heavily biased towards being solvable.

     

    Mathematicians tend not to use this taxonomy outside of papers because it's confusing.

  3. Posted

    I quite like that article, because it crystallised some thoughts I'd had about the interaction between cultural appropriation and racism.

     

    It appears that you've confused things that were invented, created, or popularized by members of a certain culture with things that are meaningful or important to members of a certain culture.

     

    It's definitely not just him - there was an incident in the UK recently of a Mexican restaurant being prevented from handing out sombreros as a marketing stunt, calling it cultural appropriation. Pretty sure sombreros mostly just keep the sun off.

     

    I could not disagree more. Do you really not see the problem with a system that says "This [cultural appropriation] is bad when you do it to one race [black people] but not bad when you do it to another race [white people]"?

     

    The flaw in this argument is obvious when we make it about something real:

     

    I could not disagree more. Do you really not see the problem with a system that says "This [discrimination] is bad when you do it to one race [black people] but not bad when you do it to another race [white people]"?

     

    Which is an argument that reverse racism exists, essentially, and I'm hoping that I don't have to explain why that's bullshit.

  4. Posted

    Thumbs! I have a question, a philosophical quandary for you!

     

    I was on a Skype call with a friend, and we realized that my headset mic was faintly picking up audio coming from the headset speakers. Testing this phenomenon, I put on some music and asked "Can you hear that?" My friend responded "I can hear faint music, but I can't tell what it is." Then she guessed, correctly "Is that Never Gonna Give You Up?" Now to be clear, my friend could not actually recognize the song based on the audio, instead she used her knowledge of me to deduce "Ninety-Three is playing a song for someone else. It's probably Never Gonna Give You Up, that seems like a Ninety-Three move."

    The question is: Did I successfully Rickroll my friend? Can you Rickroll someone who doesn't hear the (intelligible) audio?

     

    I was going to say trick question, anyone still trying to Rickroll people in 2015 doesn't have friends, but there's a more fundamental problem.

     

    The difference between Rickrolling and listening to Rick Astley's biggest hit is the subverted expectation. A Rickroll is when you're expecting one thing and get Rick Astley instead. If she can guess you're playing Never Gonna Give You Up, she can't be unpleasantly surprised by Never Gonna Give You Up, which means she hasn't been Rickrolled.

  5. Posted

    I'm so mad at how irresponsible the parties that created this situation were/are. Does this mean everyone has to leave?

     

    Wish you the best Gormongous.

     

    Look up the Centralia fire some time. Go out to see it! Take your grandkids to see it.

  6. Posted

    I've deleted about half a dozen snarky posts because I don't like how snarky I get on these here forums, but the disconnect here seems to be between people defining games in terms of its properties, and people defining games in terms of the critical apparatus best suited to critiquing a work.

     

    I have given up on trying to elaborate on how I feel about this particular discussion but rest assured the people arguing for the limitations of the medium (or trying to invent a new medium no-one, in practice, cares about, and thus arguing for the limitations of the medium) are off my Christmas card list.

  8. Posted

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that nobody cares when boobs are shown on Game of Thrones, Sopranos or Orange is the New Black, but draw some tits and all of a sudden it's weird and wrong.

     

    It definitely bothers people when it's clearly done to get some boobs on the screen - Game of Thrones got a lot of flak for its 'sexposition' in the first season, which it stopped doing in later seasons, and its willingness to exploit sex for shocks still gets tongues wagging. Orange is the New Black definitely had people complaining in the most recent season about a character who got her kit off on screen, it seemed, primarily to have an attractive woman naked on screen and not for a good narrative reason. The ongoing relationship between Piper and Alex, which is sexually explicit, doesn't seem to bother people much because that narrative is part of the story for those characters, and if you removed it, it'd make the show worse.

     

    Anime doesn't traffic in the same genres as premium drama - a sober show about a middle-aged mobster would feel like a waste of the medium - and for most of those genres, explicit sexuality rarely enhances the narrative.

     

    There's probably also a little culture shock going on - America is more progressive in terms of gender roles than Japan is (though not as much as the West likes to think it is). In addition, anime has, as an industry, doubled down on sleaze in recent years, so people are going to be less charitable about any individual show because of the way the industry as a whole acts. (HBO also has this problem - the immediate assumption was that the boobs in Game of Thrones were HBO's fault.)

  10. Posted

    Yeah, I think what I should have said was that the superhero MMO sub-genre tends to be way more aggressive about character customisation than fantasy MMOs. Most of the fun of City of Heroes was in the character creator, and that set the expectations for that theme. Colour customisation isn't nearly as much of a thing in fantasy MMOs - GW2 has a lot of armour dyes, but you can't change weapon colours at all. In WoW it's a big deal that some classes can change the appearance of certain spells, but you can't dye equipment at all.

  11. Posted

    While you have to pay, you don't have to pay real money - dyes are on the trading post (I think free players can't buy them, but I'm sure if they're not too expensive you could charm a Thumb into being your proxy) and transmutation charges can be earned from exploring cities and through PvP.

  14. Posted

    I find it difficult to care about Nicki Minaj. Like, clearly there is someone out there that thinks her music is great but from where I'm sitting her biggest hit was thoroughly out-classed by the 30-year-old song it sampled from, and I'm reading this and it sounds like she's trying to win gold in the oppression Olympics. She did the same thing with Taylor Swift, where she basically started a beef then pretended it was about black women getting excluded, except she kept making it about Taylor Swift. 

  15. Posted

    Please stop creating new Christmas threads. I've merged them all into one, which should be plenty for any Christmas needs you all apparently have.

     

    I was sort of hoping the Christmas 2022 one would survive, but it's probably fair that it's in here and it makes no fucking sense.

  16. Posted

    The service existing at all. With Uber, it's much more clearly rent-seeking, because most municipalities already have a taxi service and while it's usually arthritic it's also more aware of the demographics of the market. For instance, pensioners often rely on taxis, and it's people on fixed incomes that get fucked over by Uber. Valve aren't as predatory, but they are predatory, as the way they conduct their Steam sales attests. In the case of their games, their incentive is not to make a great game but to make a profitable platform, and while they enjoy touting how much money the various content providers make, they're shackled to Valve's whims and don't have the freedom to take that hard work elsewhere. Valve gets to look like good guys for paying people for doing work, instead of employers, while Valve doesn't have to contribute anything other than a stamp of approval. Gabe Newell's even talked about outsourcing everything to their customers, which he claims is because they're better than Valve but that doesn't mean Valve's going to treat them better than an employee.

     

    Essentially my beef with them is a) they used to be cool, and coolshades) Valve's business model plays into the disconnection of labour and capital over the last decade, where because capital has the money, anyone making any money at all is instructed to feel grateful for the opportunity.

     

    Most of what I like about Valve - the Steam client (cards excepted), Portal 2, Half-Life - are in their past, and their role in the robot dystopia is their future.

  17. Posted

    The World Ends With You has a post-game that's almost entirely driven by high-level drops instead of cash. Everything boils down to cash, though, which is useful because there's a high-end department store that you've been running past the entire game and now that you've got ridiculous amounts of money, you can walk in, buy a million-yen watch, and freak out the sales staff.

     

    We are never going to see a sequel to that game, and at this point I'm tempted to make my own instead of waiting.

  18. Posted

    It has a lot to do with our lord Christmas Remover leaving us without his love

    hot twitter name change jokes here, folks. get em while they're terrible.

     

    Someone had to get there first and I'm glad it was you

     

    no but seriously if Christmas Remover could remove some Christmases that'd be great

  19. Posted

    Why would Valve release a game? It's far more profitable to build a platform for their users to make content for them, and then they sit in the middle and claim 30%. They're like the Uber of games, in that I hate their business model.

  23. Posted

    Honestly I don't know if you can do it with one currency, or at least I've never seen it done with one currency. The better game economies I've seen have players really resource-constrained at the start, and you need some resource that's locked behind high-end content at the end. You can walk around with 15 million if you want, all it gets you is the ability to shuffle resources around a little easier.

  24. Posted

    I had a random thought: Why do so many games have broken economies? The kind where you have so much money that you can always buy everything you want in every shop you find such that money isn't really a resource. I would think that it's easy to notice that the game works that way in development, and I would think most developers understand that's not the way things ought to work, so why does it keep happening?

     

    Because it's really fucking hard to have an economy where:

    • the player has to choose what to buy
    • the player can't buy end-game upgrades for a while
    • high-level upgrades feel reasonably priced from the mid-game perspective (i.e. not grindy)
    • prices make some kind of comparative sense

    Most games that manage it are fantasy games where the game world makes so little sense that you kind of gloss over the fact that a jar of glass costs a month's worth of food, or there's a bunch of things to spend currency on that don't really have any real-world analogue (such as spending souls on 'character levels' in Dark Souls).