Gormongous

Yeah, I was more referring to the Catholic university part, anyway. Our department chair might have a secret bastard daughter he's pulling strings to get accepted here, our university president might be openly involved in racketeering, but heaven forbid your religion or dress code are a hair less than kosher. It doesn't really get me down that often -- ties and cufflinks are almost as fun accessories as nail polish and eyeliner. Speaking of all that, I might as well do a little life update myself. After wasting all of last semester trying to learn enough Italian and German to read the hundred-book bibliography I'd put together for my dissertation, I finally admitted to myself I was being naive. Instead, I just started writing my prospectus, the twenty-page proposal that formally begins my dissertation, and got done after about a month. It's submitted for review as of three days ago and I can expect my advisor to rubber-stamp it because he's on sabbatical and too busy playing XCOM on pain meds. So basically, a month of hard work and the ball's right back in my court. Grad school! I figure I'll focus on getting one of my seminar papers published, as if it were so easy, and then begin writing chapters of my dissertation in earnest this summer. Skipping out on the big Kalamazoo conference this time will help, since it's an exhausting week of nothing that's been getting worse every year.

I'm studying for a Ph.D in history. I know it's right for me, because I wake up every day excited that the stuff I work on even exists, but academia has a weirdly specific idea of professionalism that most other workplaces have moved past long ago.

I wore ice blue or lavender nail polish most of junior and senior year in college. Now, doing graduate work at a Jesuit university, I've had to give it up along with a good chunk of my wardrobe. It sucks a little knowing that the career I've chosen has no room for the kind of individuality I used to enjoy.

Yeah, it's a weird thing. Out of Star Wars games, all of which have an in-universe reason to incentivize black-and-white morality, KotOR has maybe the most subtle take on it, since they have a character based entirely on the "gray" concept (and who doesn't love Jolee, really). There are also maybe a dozen items in KotOR2 alone for neutral characters that boosted charisma like crazy, allowing them to use powers from both ends of the spectrum with as little or less penalty as a full-fledged Jedi or Sith. But at the end of the day, that flexibility isn't worth giving up the incredibly powerful prestige classes and stat bonuses that come with committing to a morality. Maybe a less rigid lore would have allowed Obsidian to explore that better. I imagine they would have liked to do so, judging from the main theme of KotOR2, which is "fuck these systems that force us to act in certain ways".

Well, I played a Jedi Master, so I had the fun of all my companions loving me to death and becoming light side out of that love. Still, I feel your pain there, even though I've never experienced it. Has any game with an explicit alignment system ever incentivized the middle ground? I know Alpha Protocol and Dragon Age 2 both have much subtler and granular takes on alignments, but they still benefit the most from people either thinking you're a bastard or a saint.

He suffers from protracted and abusive fugues that leave his friends frightened of him...

Anyway, Avellone is onboard at $3.5 million, so if that happens, I'll shut up about the writing team.

So I did something I never thought I'd do. I went back and played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 - Oops! All Jedi with the new restored content mod. It was tough to get the ball rolling -- the "tutorial" on Peragus, which lasts maybe two hours, is miserable and frustrating in a way every RPG's opening act is -- but departing the first full world, Telos, for Dantooine in search of the lost Jedi, I knew I was hooked. I played a spellcaster, which I rarely do, and was totally hooking into the systems in a way I haven't done since... I don't know, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, maybe? Speaking of, the mod puts KotOR2 on par with all the other flawed Obsidian masterpieces, except without the flaws. Not once did I encounter the ridiculous bugs and glitches that plagued my first playthrough back in 2005, let alone the whole "hey guess what one of your party members was the big bad all along go fight 'em on this planet the end" jumble that was the original final act. The characters are strong, their arcs clear, and your role apparent -- even though Kreia now lies and contradicts herself a bit less than what won her fans like Richard Cobbett and Rowan Kaiser in the first place (I can't find the article I'm thinking of in praise of her character, maybe someone's Google is better than mine). There is absolutely no reason in the world now to play KotOR2, which is every bit the Empire Strikes Back to Revan's A New Hope.

Listening to the episode again, it's really interesting to hear everyone struggling to express their feelings about a game that is both really exciting and really disappointing. I've had that relationship with the Total War games for the past decade or so. After Rome: Total War, every installment Creative Assembly's released has been broken in some major way, but I've played every single one, wearing my love/hate relationship on my sleeve all the while. I think that might just be the way it is with really ambitious games. Also, now that Nick's officially here, you guys can talk about Crusader Kings II on the podcast! Surely John Q. Video Games has played Paradox's best yet.

Yeah, I guess that's more to my point. I can't think of any fantasy author, even ones that I feel would be better suited to the Torment universe like R. Scott Bakker or Joe Abercrombie, to whom I would credit the power to improve upon a video game's writing in any appreciable way. I mean, you'd be seeing the polar opposite tone in my post above if it were R. Scott Bakker being brought onboard, but I'm not sure it'd change my feelings, just the way I'd express them.

I'm trying to cut down on my negativity in the wake of the whole Feminist Frequency business, but indulge me for just one second. They just announced the new stretch goals, up to $3.25 million, and the crown jewel is Patrick Rothfuss as a writer on staff. The prospect of this makes me want to unfund the game. I've read the first two books of the Kingkiller Chronicles (mind you, the only work of his that's been published) and found them some of the worst "good" fantasy I've ever had the questionable pleasure of finishing. Sure, his craft on a sentence-by-sentence basis is incredibly deft and polished, but the books as a whole totally fall apart. His characters have no interiority, existing only to flatter various aspects of the self-insert protagonist, who is shallow and petty and loved by all good people, with the plot likewise a series of improbable events that highlights the exceptional worth of said self-insert protagonist. It reads like fan fiction -- exceptionally competent and savvy fan fiction, but fan fiction nonetheless, written to show off a badass character concept. I don't know, I'm sure plenty of people here love Name of the Wind, for perfectly good reasons, but I don't think Rothfuss is a particularly good author and have no idea where he belongs in a team of writers on a game. Maybe they'll keep him from his more egregious indulgences. I certainly hope so.

(IGN.com)

I've been chewed out by a racist, sexist twelve-year-old on most FPS games, but I've never had someone take it upon themselves to drive me from the community by following me from game to game, harping on my playstyle, which has happened twice in LoMa games I've tried. Like sLiPdIsCo and Jake have said, the high time investment and low margin for error mean that the average player can lose their shit a lot faster and feel a lot more justified for it. If more LoMa games can enable newbies on a large scale without it becoming a stigma, that's awesome. I'd love to see it. I just don't think we're there yet, and in the meantime I think "aggressive communication" provides a smokescreen for some real assholes to thrive, just like the whole "well of course Xbox Live is full of immature bigots on " attitude.

I love what you're saying, Sean, because so few people stick up for an online community's less than total friendliness, but a lot of your points are straying dangerously close to "It's fun when you play with friends," which is something of a universal truth with games and doesn't entirely address concerns over a culture composed of perfectly nice people with good intentions interacting to form a toxic gestalt. There are reasons I don't play LoMa games, and not all of them involve a lack of free time or the odd hours I keep.

There is, in the options menu. It's just not enabled by default, presumably to... fuck, I can't even imagine a reason why.

I had it once, in the final mission. Either an explosion or a Berserker hit, I don't remember which, knocked my Heavy into the air, and he clipped a railing while falling. When he stood up again, he couldn't move or shoot. Saving and reloading allowed me to shoot, but not to move, so the poor guy spent the entire climax of the game on Overwatch by the entrance. It was a bit of a bummer, but a fairly explicable bug. Could yours have been caused by some weird physics stuff, TP?

Yeah, or the Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines way, where rewards for world- and story-traversal were method-agnostic.

That's the problem I experienced trying to help my ex find good mental health services in a new city. Everyone wants to be helpful, but no one wants to be responsible. You've just got to keep trying until you find someone who will stick their neck out for you. In the meantime, we're all here for you, I'm sure you know that.

I've always felt that it's fair to assume as much, if a creator seems particularly deaf to the implications of their creation. Sometimes happenstance can be more meaningful than intent, without denigrating the latter.

Yeah, and then a couple of my friends acted like I was an idiot when I expressed surprise over it. Almost made me want to do another non-lethal speed run just to get the achievement and show them I wasn't.

I figured it was "Dishonored" because you didn't announce it or even acknowledge it in the podcast. Dishonored holidays happen a week or two before, right? So I'm looking forward to episode 100: "The Return of Nick Breckon".

That's one thing I really wonder about. Many of these hallowed franchises are eyeballing online-only frameworks for better control of the end product, but only have the goodwill to do so because the relatively open nature of previous installments allowed fans to polish them to perfection. I know for a fact that barely-there mod support in the later Total War series titles alienated a bunch of core fans and Civilization V couldn't receive the same fan attention because it was a more closed platform. Nostalgia aside, will some series be able to keep their reputation as great games without the fans being allowed to help them become so?

I wanted this episode to be named "Wrong for Cooltown and Wrong for You" so bad.

Yeah, that's a good blog post. It meshes with a lot of feelings I have about historical movies as a professional historian. "Authenticity" is the word I always use, a collection of moments that "seem right" when they transpire. More than anything, I think it's about not having to see the seams where they could stitch things together and the gaps where they couldn't. Wolf Hall is a good example: not to tip my hand for when the pre-discussion thread is posted, but I enjoyed my inability to see where reality ended and fiction began. That's the role of most facsimiles, right? Blurring the line between the two in a way that appeals to the audience's instincts. So watching a YouTube video of some random Joe's city, I'm immediately struck by all the incongruities. A mature city in the game behaves in few of the half-understood ways we think cities do, but that's not to say our expectations are violated in aspects that are enlightening, like sometimes (but sadly very seldom) happens in historical movies. It just seems to be a broken city inhabited by not-people. So yeah, it doesn't really adhere to anyone's intuition of a city, real or imagined, save maybe for a radical Communist's dying fever-dream of a capitalist society in transition. And that's really disappointing to me.

Isn't the whole point of agent-based simulation that it's more visible, comprehensible, and intuitive to the player than statistics-based simulation? It blows my mind just a little that these were the compromises that seemed appropriate to Maxis to preserve the essence of the simulation, wherein several of the major systems don't even really interact, not that I could really suggest any alternative beyond scaling back to a largely symbolic use of agents.