BobbyBesar

Irishjohn might have meant observer ward positioning rather than sentry ward. At low levels, people actually buying and using observer wards effectively are rare, so de-warding probably won't come up much.

I posted this almost exactly on another forum, but I think it's relevant exactly to the concerns BFrank is addressing: Based on the videos I've seen (I haven't watched the latest one yet), "catalog" is not a bad term. In actual fact, she doesn't provide much commentary or editorialize on the games she cites. She simply presents them and says: this is an illustration of the trend that I am describing. When you look at the actual text, she doesn't even state outright that the things she describes are bad, or that they should be avoided. They're just presented to say: This is a thing that occurs. It often occurs unthinkingly. Please be aware of it. Her aim is not to provide commentary on any of the specific examples that she's presenting. the actual project has a very specific goal and scope, which is basically "awareness". By presenting a number of these issues to the viewer and describing them, the videos make people more able to identify these sorts of things as they're consuming media on their own, which they can then use in their own appraisals and decision making. But the problem is that, particularly in the heightened environment these videos are released into, it's problematic to simply present examples without making a statement. That allows everybody to impose their own agenda or impressions on the video. Simply by presenting them, people assume you much be making a statement about them. (This is not an inherently bad assumption.) Actually, a similar thing happens with TvTropes. In some arenas, linking and citing TvTropes in response to a particular TV show or etc. is considered criticism, basically it's an implied "this show is bad because they couldn't think of anything more creative than Trope X". But that's not how the tropes work. They're descriptive of trends that are common to the medium, not prescriptively used by screenwriters and authors. Any concept can be "trope-ified", but that doesn't eliminate it's effective story telling power. Avoiding tropes is not inherently desirable. But it comes back to a favorite hobby-horse of the Idle Thumbs crew: deliberate design. Make a _decision_ to objectify women because it has some important role within your story. Don't simply do it unthinkingly because "that is what is done". And if every game (or even a signifcant portion of high profile games) are making a decision, deliberate or not, to objectify women in the same way, that probably says something about the industry. But fundamentally, these videos are aimed at the consumer, not the producer. It's simply a matter of being aware of what assumptions and prejudices you, as a content consumer may have re-inforced by consuming this media. It's about a mode of consumption, not about the work itself. Of course, even this is a pretty nuanced and media-theory distinction that I think a lot of the most vociferous critics aren't really cognizant of. There's little to no attempt to analyze why these tropes exist or contextualize them within the broader media landscape (very few of the effects she describes are unique to games, film and television provide a rich tapestry of much of the same content). She deliberately does not address that, because that's not within the scope of her videos. Stating that she misrepresents an individual example is missing the point: she's speaking to a culture and an atmosphere, not criticism of individual works. I think there IS value to the limited scope of what her project is doing, and the fact is that there isn't much more of that kind of analysis going on in the industry, which is why she is given so much attention. As a general rule, I find "awareness" to be the least interesting and least valuable goal of these kinds of campaigns, but given the response from the general gaming community, it demonstrates how necessary it may be in this case.

I do, but I find those kind of cultural-identity politics to be deeply weird wherever they show up, so I'm probably not a good sounding board.

Movie buffs absolutely do self-identify as movie buffs. There are even movies that specifically target those audiences because a certain level of familiarity with the breadth or history of the medium is required to fully appreciate it.

Somebody should make a game that's just a sequence of meeting women and then seeing them gunned down tragically in front of you, gradually escalating your need for vengeance. First your wife, then your sister, then the paramedic who tries to save her, then your daughter, then the no-nonsense cop who was helping you investigate all the previous killings. Then it's revealed that you're actually your own female twin and you're really investigating your own death after you were gunned down.

Re: the P.T. effectiveness, I'm a little surprised that nobody mentioned Fatal Frame, which used a camera conceit to enforce a similar effect of forcing the user to look directly at the horror elements. Here's a link to the image with that Yoshi bit: http://mynintendonews.com/2014/08/06/mind-blown-yoshis-real-name-is-t-yoshisaur-munchakoopas/ It's seems clear from the phrasing "properly known as" that T. Yoshisaurus Munchakoopas is not a given name, but the proper taxonomic name. Usually in binomial / trinomial naming, the genus is abbreviated to a single initial.So, Genus: T, which I'm going to assume is "Tyrannosaur", although that's not necessarily the case (there are multiple dinosaur Genera that start with T) Species: Yoshisaur Sub-species: Munchakoopas. Possibly there are other subspecies, either than specialize in eating Goombas (Munchagoombas, obviously), or those fruits you can eat in Mario World. Also could be determined by coloration. It's also possible that T refers to Family (possibly Tyrannosauridae), in which case the Genus is Yoshisaurus, and species is Munchakoopas. That matches more closely with typical terminology (-saurus seems to be typical of genus names). In this case, I'd assume that "Yoshi" is probably the common name for the species in the Mushroom Kingdom (e.g. "Dog" for Canis familiaris). The individual's name could also be Yoshi, although that's kind of like naming your dog "Dog". Given that Yoshi's are largely treated as interchangeable, I'm going to assume they don't have given names, they're more like draft / livestock animals.

Looks like the core mechanic is based on the old DS game Polarium. They upped the complexity pretty substantially though, both with size and with the multiple exits.

Granted, if the running narrative is "madman who killed people", it's provocative to paint him in a positive light. If the prevailing narrative is "innocent teen killed", it's provocative to paint him in a more negative light. That being said, 1) there's already more than enough negativity around Brown (the convenience store video alone provided more than enough of that) to the extent that the NY Times piece comes across as either character assassination or just straight up racism. 2) any character assassination of Brown at this point will inevitably be interpreted as post-hoc justification for his shooting, which the Times could not possibly be unaware of.. 3) Anybody who cites anything done by a 5 year old as thought it has any bearing whatsoever on a person's character or personality is either an idiot or straight up trolling. To the extent that it makes me want to read the entire thing as an Onion article. It looks like the NY Times piece was trying for a kind of internal point-counterpoint, to present positive and negative things in alternating patterns and use that juxtaposition for dramatic effect. It was, however, pretty poorly executed in that regard, and just comes across as tone-deaf.

That page is amazing. The random images, the overblown rhetoric, all the way down to the strategically place N-G on the anime logo. It's basically self-parody.

Not intentionally singling out your comment, because this is the standard terminology used in this field. But It's unfortunate that the terminology for this is inherited from systems set up with an explicit good / bad / true ending hierarchy, because it colors the discussion into making people assume one ending is preferred to another. If done properly (and I'll submit that Silent Hill 2 mostly was), all the endings should be equally reasonable given the narrative experienced by the player. Of course, there is still a problem of expectation and communication. The player should understand that their actions will affect the narrative, and so have enough buy-in to the experience that they're going to actually be invested in "role-playing" the content. And they should have enough understanding of the kinds of things that might affect the story, while still not knowing the details of how each individual action is calculated. It's also, I think, an issue with people not having the right context for variable stories instead expecting that there's only one "true" version of each story. Silent Hill 2's endings are good because they're fairly distinct. They aren't simply "...but this time X is dead" type endings.

Speaking of magic damage, the Crate and Crowbar podcasts right after The International had some interesting discussion about the narrative-mechanical logical incoherence of some of the magic damage / physical damage distinctions made within the game and how it's utterly baffling for a new player. That's a good addition to the "DoTA for not quite beginners" guide that I outlined when first picking up the game. There's still a lack of convenient reference guides for a lot of newbie stuff that's above "how does I move" but below serious strategy talk, I guess that stuff is all just on youtube and lack of quick-lookup reference is just the way it's going to be.

Nah, it's fine. Remember that money is speech. If those reporters want to stand there, they just need to buy the property first.

If we're handing series back to their original creators, somebody should really give Quest for Glory back to the Coles. They....really seem like they need it. (I backed Hero U, but ...it's rough)

1. Men basically made those rules. 2. Humans have long gestation/rearing periods. (I'm of course only partly serious. The impact of human reproductive biology on social and cultural structures is interesting, but terribly complicated.)

See also: Hellbanning.

One the topic of choice and branching narrative, one of the best, and least-imitated implementations of multiple endings in a game was Silent Hill 2, which keyed off things that were quite obscure, and some even mechanical rather than narrative (prime example: if you tended to be at low health throughout the game instead of healing immediately after getting hurt, that would lead to one of the darker endings). Having the endings be somewhat thematically tied to your actions but not explicitly determined by player choice means that each player's experience gives their character a consistent character arc, without reducing everything to discrete yes/no choices. I can't think of too many examples like that. The recent Binary Domain by Sega has a trust / friendship system with multiple different endings depending on how close you are to various characters along the way. Again, this is never made explicit, to the point that when I looked up the game in FAQs, there wasn't even consensus on how many permutations of the ending existed. There aren't a ton of endings, but every one is reasonable given the events of the game.

Not sure what the time frames are, but it's pretty standard procedure to put any officer who's involved in a shooting on leave until the investigation is completed. Which isn't to say that he won't be fired later. The cop who shot the dog 1) may also have been on leave in the meantime, or more likely, 2) shooting a dog may not meet the standard to trigger the automatic leave-policy.

One thing that, I guess, was implied but never stated outright is that the feelings that "there must be some way all of this could just be avoided" are likely deliberate and entirely appropriate to our understanding of the politics of the time. Everything had to be balanced just so to get the war that we got. It's getting pretty far off topic, but given the comments about the use of archetypes as stand-ins for countries, I couldn't help but wonder if any of the panel had seen Grand Budapest Hotel, and what you though about it. I found Grand Budapest Hotel disappointing, I think because it had the feel of an allegory for the WWI transition period that Last Express captures, but then it never really seems to pay it off. It may be unfair, because that may not be what Anderson was really trying for, but it did have a distinct allegorical feel to it that felt abandoned. (Although the villains were essentially Nazi stand-ins, the general theme, of the dissolution of the more genteel world represented by the hotel into modernity has greater echoes of WWI. The best that I can construct, it could have been intended as an sort of revisionist illustration that the nobility of the pre-war era was just as grasping and ugly as the period after it, but that's something of a stretch.)

You want a funny (well, "funny") illustration of the militarization of police forces (among other things)? Play Police Quest. Then Police Quest:SWAT. Then .Then Battlefield: Hardline.

You aren't wrong, Tarzan did some really impressive animation stuff at the time, with regards to the parkour-tree-swinging stuff (I think it was some kind of CG-hybrid technique). IIRC, that was mostly drowned out by "Soundtrack by Phil Collins" and "Musical number by Rosie o'Donnell".

"the flat composite transformed into a dynamic functional machine in about 4 minutes. It then crawled away..." http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/7/5975463/transforming-origami-robot-builds-itself-by-folding

A recent TL;DR podcast addressed this. To whit: yes, it's safe to assume that women are harassed more for the same activities. People who are mean on twitter are probably not sociopaths. Although I wouldn't be surprised if in another 20 years, the DSM invented another disorder that basically amounts to "online troll disorder": a sliding scale of inability to emphathize with people who you never physically see.

See: Tomodachi Life.

Depending on your political philosophy? 100% In other words:

You aren't the only one. Apparently, her project actually launched! makelovenotporn.tv (I'm assuming it's very NSFW). It's a difficult question: how do you promote a healthy relationship with sex. I.e. not something that's scary or evil, something that's a lot of fun but that also has a lot of potential emotional and physical repercussions, and so shouldn't be taken too lightly. For the record, some of the more "artistic" oriented porn sites do have seem to have porn that's less hostile to women than most of the stuff that's on the internet, but even then much of the material still falls into many of the usual traps. (also: http://loveyourbody.nowfoundation.org/)