Gormongous

Resurrecting the Social Justice thread after half a year of dormancy to remind everyone that, with the ever-present help of mainstream media, the academy is still shadowboxing with the concepts of safe spaces and trigger warnings and, somehow, still getting its butt kicked. The latest incident is the dean of students from the University of Chicago sending out a preemptive letter to incoming freshman, of all people, declaring the institution's unilateral rejection of any concept like those above that could conceivably impinge on academic freedom: http://www.thetattooedprof.com/archives/650 Of course, it's always fun to watch colleges and universities choose to assert their relevance to current discourse by positioning themselves as bastions against anything that wafts too much of social justice, since it just proves that they're dinosaurs that had no problem with content warnings when they were called ratings or safe spaces when they were men's-only clubs. The greatest of their luminaries pen jeremiads about the cowardice inherent in allowing Donald Trump a platform on the media while reserving their collective right to invite Milo Yiannopoulos or Ben Shapiro to have a platform on campus. There are no words. EDIT: Ah, the dean's bizarre shot across the bow makes more sense now, after this article saying that donations are sinking across the board from alumni alienated by the new generation's passion for activism: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/us/college-protests-alumni-donations.html EDIT EDIT: And a Storify from a former University of Chicago student body president completes the picture. University administrators, dealing with pressure from the students on sexual assault policies and campus policing transparency among other things, are trying to change the conversation to be about student entitlement because they refuse to be held accountable for their institution's decisions: https://storify.com/chewinchawingum/no-safe-spaces-except-for-those-in-power

I'm surprised that Reyturner's not in this thread trying to talk people into playing Burning Wheel. I'm surprised I'm not in this thread trying to talk people into playing Adeptus Evangelion or Bliss Stage.

When talking about the "apolitical" politics of the game, Nick Capozzoli tweeted about an interview with the artistic director where the latter briefly tried to argue that the fictional phrase predated the actual one (which was popularized by Trayvon Martin's death in 2013). We're either seeing an unwillingness to accept that they were making hay out of real-world events or a (frankly unbelievable) lack of research and awareness on the human cost of racism.

For me, I understand being excited about the game you're making and not feeling able to walk back the statements that you've made in that excitement, particularly if you have a huge corporation at your back pushing to make your game into a tentpole release, but Hello Games' actions leading up to and following release are really an excellent example of Hanlon's Razor in games marketing. For years, they were deliberately vague about the game's possibility space, emphasizing the extensibility of the bedrock tech instead, but in the six or so months before No Man's Sky launched, they began to be more concrete about gameplay while still choosing not to discount any explanations of what the game wasn't going to be. Now, afterwards, they're totally silent. It just smacks of the idealism of having your product speak for itself, rather than having a real comms strategy, and forgetting that there's no built-in mechanism, even in the best product, for reconciling expectations and reality (ideally, the person to do that is the one who's been going around saying that multiplayer is technically possible and so on). It also smacks of a willingness to have your cake and eat it, moving units of your game on misunderstandings and hype as much as its inherent qualities, but I just brought up Hanlon's Razor, so... Anyway, furthermore, I think the selective vagueness of the marketing, especially Murray's off-the-cuff comments, was invariably going to be picked up the most by people who were most likely to have their imagination first captured and then disappointed. If you aren't willing to speak about your game only in concrete terms, you have to choose either to say nothing at all or to say that things have changed later, else people are going to get let down. Also, I also miss the experience of going into a game blind as a child and feeling excited that it could be anything, but I think the nostalgia of the Thumbs misses the obverse of that experience: going into a game blind, having a handful of underwhelming interactions, and dumping the game because I thought that was all there was to it. I left the original Fallout in the dust as a kid because I loaded it up, went to Shady Sands, got in a fight where I had to kill the entire town, and then I didn't know where to go. "Weird game," I thought, and didn't actually play through again until college.

Sean cast! The energy's so great for this one.

I played a game of Scythe finally, at a friend's place, and all it did was confirm to me that I don't really get what makes a game "hot" in internet communities. There are a lot of cool things at work in Scythe: unique player boards with upgradable orders, military units that are also used as transports for workers, an achievement-based calculator for when to end the game, and a tiered victory point system that restricts aggressive behavior without disincentivizing it. It's clearly a careful design by a smart guy, and yet... I don't know, even though I ended up winning, there were just a ton of things that didn't gain traction with me how I like. It's weird that it's only worth it for each player to win two battles, because that's the maximum number of stars to be gained from it, and yet the game is constantly throwing combat cards and power levels your way like you're constantly getting into fights. If that's supposed to be an incentive by itself, it didn't work in our game at all. Resources are incredibly important in the early game, but once you've built all your mechs and buildings, made all your upgrades, and recruited all your soldiers towards the mid-game they plummet in value to being the weakest source of victory points, which also reduces workers from the key means of getting resources to the weakest form of area control. I understand the urge to keep a player with an airtight engine from running away with the game, but there's an incredibly unsatisfying feeling to having laid out your workers across the perfect number of hexes to be defensible and to provide you with all the resources you need... until you've bought everything, then you splay them out trying to claim as much territory as you can for the end-game. A lot of the "hard" decisions for units and buildings are actually not that hard: you don't have to defend buildings once they're built, because they're there for the rest of the game, so their placement's usually a matter of at-the-moment convenience; losing combat just wastes a move order and gives you a card, while winning it can tank your popularity and only gains you the space on which you fought; characters and mechs, the two combat units, are almost always better employed having encounters (the character's only other utility, except for fighting) and transporting workers, respectively. Honestly, the biggest downside for me is that most of the systems have been deliberately tuned not to be "random," something the designer and his fans have trumped up all over the internet. Yeah, great, but there's a ton of hidden information and card draws. Deterministic chaos technically isn't randomness, but it's managed exactly the same way, so... I don't know, it doesn't seem like a worthy design goal for me when it makes so many of the game's decisions feel less exciting to confront. If I could ever get it to the table again, I'd almost rather play Sons of Anarchy, which gets a lot more energy out of the "worker placement but you can attack other player's workers" cluster of mechanics...

I also have a Cassandra Basebuilder game that's stalled waiting for the hundreds of plasteel needed to roll in. It feels like a very unsatisfying "victory" just to have to wait for the RNG to throw me the materials I need and for me to just survive in the meantime...

Also, Yowamushi Pedal building one of its early arcs around the specific mechanics of drafting is definitely par for the course with sports anime, if not anime in general. One of the things that I love the most about the medium of anime is that it's one of the only ones, short of certain types of novels and high-level games, that is willing to sit its audience down and educate them on the particulars of the highly specialized knowledge in some part of a profession in order to establish dramatic stakes that demand that knowledge. Sometimes they fail and it just becomes a random lesson on the infield fly rule or special relativity, right in the middle of your anime episode, but sometimes you get the special thrill of being an insider to this rarefied sector of human endeavor. The overwhelming majority of movies and television would never even dare that, and the scant few that do, like Primer, are categorized as niche just for trying. Meanwhile, the easiest way for me to sell Spice & Wolf, an anime about medieval finance and commerce, is to tell people that the major crisis of the first season is the characters reacting to news that the silver content of the local currency is about to change (and whether they will be enriched or ruined by that).

She was the only person of color in the episode, but the only other comment about her skin was ol' Billy Shakes finding it hot, so... kinda? It felt so much like flippant hand-waving to me, but the internet tells me that it really resonated with some people. Yeah, I didn't mean to say that revisionist narratives that empower people of color is a Bad Thing, just that it can suck how, intentionally or not, the mainstream misconstrues such narratives that give people of color a version of history that's meaningful to them to say, instead, that there's nothing wrong with these Old White Men narratives, once the whitewash has been removed. I take it as a sign of one of the many ways that mainstream culture uses minority culture to legitimize itself and its dominant narratives.

I definitely found myself agreeing with Rob's observation that works revising history to give oppressed or marginalized peoples the agency and empowerment that they were denied in truth are often used by mainstream culture to legitimize the preexisting narrative that those people weren't oppressed or marginalized. I'm reminded of an episode of Doctor Who wherein the Doctor takes his companion Martha, a black woman, back to Shakespeare's time. Martha, being smart, worries aloud that she'll stand out as a black woman, but the Doctor brushes her off, saying that her concerns are overblown and people were a lot more accepting than one might think in sixteenth-century England. Now, I know the intent was playful, imagining a version of history where a white man and a black woman walking together in public as equals wouldn't arouse even the slightest comment, but it's so hard not to read it as racism and sexism not really being as bad as sources and scholars tell us, which is... eh.

Agreed! As I was saying on the Slack, it gets the medievalist seal of approval from me. Rulership in the Middle Ages was entirely about personal relationships and low-information short-term decision-making, so the Tinder interface does a great job of forcing the player into a similar decision space as your average medieval king: you know how to succeed, vaguely, but it's not often that you're given the right combination of circumstances to actually put that knowledge into practice. My main complaint is that the plot, insofar as there is one, manages to be both vague and obtrusive, and when it's over you have to reset your entire game to keep playing. That's not great. Also, your rulers only get epithets the first time they get one of the achievements, so the first couple centuries I had a bunch of flavorful-sounding kings, then a lot of bare names towards the end of the game. Patching in regnal numbers would go a long, long way to fixing that gripe.

I feel like it was inevitable, though? That much hype and that much vagueness, there was going to be a feature that an appreciable segment of the fanbase had decided in advance would be important and turned out to be unimportant or even nonexistent.

Oh, ugh. #NotAllGamergateSupporters, of course. I'm sure that "cultural differences" is not a dog-whistle for "fake gamer girls/guys" or other kinds of nerd "persecution," too. This reduces my enjoyment of his game, unfortunately.

My girlfriend's taken sick during my visit, so I'll have to pass, sadly. Next time!

It's embarrassing how long it took me to figure out how to build a barn with a feed yard and confine non-pet animals to it. I also had a heatwave that was badly exacerbated by animals inside my building, that's really what pushed me to do it.

From my own brief experience streaming Crusader Kings 2, I honestly think that a super-experienced person just rocking a game to pieces and explaining how they're doing it on a stream isn't that interesting, not unless there's another angle. Even just as a backdrop to me thinking of Cool Historical Facts to say, I don't think it was anywhere near as entertaining as Nick deciding to murder the king of France over a perceived slight or you missing a cannibalistic pyromaniac rampaging through your base. Those are frustrating to experience in the moment, as a viewer, but they become my fondest memories of those streams, on reflection.

I am also a victim of these streams.

The best sports anime tend to be very procedural and deeply grounded in their subject. The best baseball anime, Cross Game, regularly devotes four or more episodes to the moment-by-moment progress of the game and takes multiple asides to explain rules, the better to heighten the dramatic tension. Even sports anime about obscure sports, like karuta in Chihayafuru, are enjoyable because of that desire to onboard the viewer at the same level of knowledge and passion as the characters in them. Side note, Danielle would definitely love Chihayafuru. Rob probably would, too.

The only thing that really makes me miss Z-levels is the painful micromanaging that you need to level a hill or mountain of any size: mine out the center, mine out the sides, let it all collapse, then repeat. The AI pathing is mostly good, but positioning itself to not be under a mountain when it comes down is not one of its specialties. Anyway, yeah, I bought it and I'm totally hooked. My first base has Nick Breckon the genius scientist and doctor, who did fine his first year but has now become addicted to drinking and getting into fistfights, in the course of which he's lamed his left arm and lost four fingers... which makes him a slightly less genius scientist and doctor, because the barely competent vet has to come patch him up. EDIT: He's stopped fighting, but I've discovered that excessive drinking reduces some skills permanently? He was a few hundred XP from a 20/20 in Research in spring of my second year, but now he's down to 18/20 and I wouldn't have noticed except that I happened to mouse over the skill bar when he was drunk and I saw it literally shrinking before my eyes.

Oh man, if there's a chance in hell that I can drag my girlfriend to Berlin, I could be there. No promises, I guess, but I'm going to try!

I want to give you solidarity, Twig, but no.

Yeah, I don't think there's any constituency or demographic that's immune to garden-variety ballot confusion. Last year, during the Hugo Awards that were tainted by all the Puppy bullshit, guides were popping up everywhere on how to vote "no award" for categories where there were no legitimate finalists... and more than half of them (some written by longtime voters in the Hugos) simply suggested to place "no award" at the top of the ballot with all the finalists below it, seemingly unaware that "no award" was itself a finalist that could lose the initial vote and be eliminated in the instant runoff system, redistributing protest votes to the very finalists that the voters had intended to protest. George R.R. Martin (of all people) had to write a surprisingly in-depth post explaining how to put "no award" at the top of the ballot with no finalists ranked below it, if a "'no award' or bust" result was actually intended.

It's worth pointing out that Ross Perot spoiled his own candidacy repeatedly in 1992, even "dropping out" for several weeks, nominally because he was afraid of taking enough electoral votes for the decision to go to the House of Representatives, but also intermittently because he claimed that the Republican Party had blackmail on him and because he didn't trust or take the advice of his own campaign managers. It's really wild to think that he had 39% of the vote in polls at one point, though!

That's the thing I miss most about Tom appearing on 3MA. Sure, it was meant as a joke, but I liked the constant, subtle pressure it provided on what exactly a strategy game even is.

In terms of saying that Clinton is "directly responsible" for certain foreign policy decisions, I'm speaking beyond the background awfulness of foreign policy by the US to the actions that she took to spearhead the "lead from behind" coalition against Libya, against many of her advisors' counsel, and to intervene in Honduras and Haiti at the behest of longtime family friends in return for, among other benefits, a gold-mining contract awarded to her brother and multiple donations to the Clinton Foundation. Any senior official in the post-9/11 US government is going to be culpable, sure, but Clinton is more culpable than most and I'm not going to throw my hands up at the subtlety of that distinction or accept that it's "unfettered oblivious privilege" to find myself disliking Clinton while Trump exists.* That immediate antipathy towards reservations or other kinds of dissent, even when that dissent is qualified by and grounded in the facts of Clinton's career, is the most frustrating part of interactions that I've had with supporters of Clinton, both in 2008 and now. Basically, I think that, just because something is preordained because of how politics has shaken out in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be criticized. In fact, I feel like it should be criticized, so as not to fall into a "lesser evil" trap of papering over the well-established negatives of one option just because a much worse option exists (and, seemingly, will always exist, although this year does feel like a nadir). I've been voting down the line in every single election for the past two and a half years, which accomplishes somewhat more than it did when I lived in Texas, so it's not like I'm sitting on my ass and complaining while doing nothing for the cause. I'm just also going to criticize Clinton, when applicable, because I think her record is terrible for the party of FDR, Kennedy, and Carter and I'm a little nonplussed by the way that Clinton has been anointed as the messiah to save us from the devil that is Trump when both candidates have done little besides trading in fear. Clinton has my vote, in all likelihood, but I'm not happy about it and I can only hope that it doesn't irreparably damage our democracy for me to let people know that we deserve more and better options. That's one of the ways that protest works, keeping in mind that it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously vote for a candidate while also being critical of their more problematic or pernicious aspects. * For a non-male, non-white, non-cis perspective on this particular feeling, this Medium post is good albeit very, very angry.