Problem Machine

I kind of resent being asked to solve a damn cryptogram in a hacky slashy game. :|

Hm. It felt like the initial summary of the TD,C dev's statement on LPs was kind of inflammatory and reductive. First, by making it sound like they were harping on LPs as the reason the game wasn't doing well, and second making it sound like they were doing content ID claims in retribution or to try to make a profit (I believe they had been automatically enabled by the game's composer's music distribution and they announced at the end of the article that they were disabling it). I still disagree with the article in some ways, since it seems to presume that people who were watching a LP in the first place were potential customers, which isn't necessarily the case, but it was a very mild and nuanced take on the subject which I think has been portrayed as far more aggressive and finger-pointy in a lot of the following discourse. To be fair you guys did end up digging into that some as the cast progressed, but my initial reaction to the summary of the situation was "whoa, what? That's not what they said!" Regarding objective reviews, the use of the word 'good' itself signifies that something can't be objective. To be good or bad implies a context within which it is good or bad: Stated absent the context, it usually just means the person liked or didn't like it, which is the case with most reviews. Where this gets a bit muddy is when you compare it to product reviews, because these reviews imply the context within which the product is good: A vacuum cleaner is good (at cleaning floors) because we tested it and it cleaned our floors well, this graphics card is good (at pushing polys) because we tried it on some games that push a lot of polys and it performed well. To evaluate a game like a product, one must first establish a context in which the game should be evaluated. Something isn't just good or bad, it's good at and bad at: These are the measures of its suitability towards its purpose. But what is the purpose of a game? Even within the relatively narrow boundary of "military first person shooter", there's a lot of personal context to the purpose that is being achieved. Is it about movement, presenting a nice physical sense of motion? About sniping? About information flow? About fast reactions? Different military first person shooters emphasize these elements differently, and thus the same game could be considered very good or very bad within the context of any one of these. If you play military FPSes to snipe dudes, you're not going to be happy with a game with no sniper rifle. Personally, particularly when I'm writing something critical of a game, I tend to write in terms of what I think the game is trying to achieve vs the final effect of its efforts. This establishes the context of my criticism, and is sort of kind of objective. Of course, choosing which elements I believe are important is highly subjective, and ultimately these criticisms have no bearing on whether the game itself is enjoyable to anyone else. It may be that objective criticism can only exist within a narrowly defined subjective context -- that some people want to see this context remain implicit, rather than presented explicitly to the reader, and want to call that 'objectivity' is troubling to me.

Yeah fuck soccer man. I thought I'd get something nice for finally beating that cheating bastard but no. no. Also the rest of the game's pretty cool. Currently going back and trying to clear out the areas. It's disappointing when I think of something clever to do in an area and it turns out it wasn't hiding a secret. What's the deal with NG+? What all does it reset? Just the diamonds and boss switches?

Who/what was it directed at?

Yesss. I find this so frustrating. Double respect to people out there who are still trying to have nuanced discussions about things online in the face of the worst and least reasonable interpretations of their words being used as ammunition in some stupid piss war.

It seems extremely unlikely they would have ever found out about it though if she wasn't being extensively scrutinized by outside parties. It's something most employees would have gotten away with, even if it was against the rules, just because no one was out there gunning for them. This is analogous to the problem of law enforcement: Hypothetically the laws are equal, but in practical application if the cops want to get you for something they pretty much always can, so in reality the law punishes those who are scrutinized the most.

I get the discomfort, but I think it's resolvable to feel 'i disagree with this person' and 'the conversation about whether this person is agreeable or not is not appropriate to this discussion of whether the way nintendo treated her is okay.' at the same time. It's a weird situation though. I think the upshot here is that, while her views are debatable and maybe questionable (I don't really know), the discussion on those views has to be taken outside of the venue her harassers have defined -- of course, once you do that, and the stakes no longer include nintendo or her job, it quickly becomes apparent that there's no real reason to talk about what some random lady thinks about the sexualization of minors with no outside context.

Don't be, it's maybe not the right conversation to have but the conversation about why it isn't the right conversation to have is absolutely the right conversation to have, so things work out.

The other part of this is that I think that western society has an absolutely insane outlook on 'cp', to the point where we consistently choose perv-bashing over the actual welfare of children, which is a huge can of worms debate I don't want to bring into this topic, which is where that line of inquiry would probably lead

It's not that any criticism of her is victim blaming, it's that this criticism is only happening because she was targeted by the shit brigade, and in that context unfortunately can be interpreted to justify their tactics. Basically we can't have good debates about it because GG types poison the well. The stakes of the conversation are no longer what they should be.

Good cast! A little bit of hopefully constructive feedback: It seemed maybe once or twice you were worried enough about dead air that you jumped back in to fill the space and kind of stepped on what Ashly was saying while she was considering phrasing or nuance. Other than that it was a great interview, and I'm looking forward to playing your game in like an hour!

I'll probably be cautious about replaying this one given the mildly traumatic experience of trying to see what happens during a more murdery run. I think Austin Walker's point about how it kind of punishes people who want to see every last bit of content is quite well-made. I certainly felt some of the same sort of uncomfortable internal scrutiny after playing it that I did after playing The Beginner's Guide.

Oh I just saw the Alphys article (didn't see it at first because it got edited in) and... wow I disagree a lot!

I would agree that some of the fourth-wall breaking concepts are a bit precious, but I think it makes the experience overall stronger that it takes that stuff and runs with it rather than trying to go by half measures.

An interesting trait of the game is that a lot of the stuff that bothered me in one playthrough would actually be resolved by either doing or reading about another one.

Yeah I tend to think of stuff like that as still being fairly well within the traditional expressiveness of game music, though that is a cool production element. Something that I haven't really seen before anywhere was that it would slightly tweak playback speeds and pitches of character themes to express their current state, the most hilarious of which was Undyne's freakout in the trash yard, where her text starts scrolling madly while her theme plays incredibly fast and high pitched. It took what would have already been a funny scene totally over the top.

Yeah, I think that's the most common thing people grabbed on to. And there's a good reason for that, since the way it handles it is really interesting: Not really moralizing about the violence, just getting progressively darker and scarier the more violence you bring into it. It's not the first game I've seen harness 'creepypasta' type techniques into its storytelling, but it's probably the most successful and undoubtedly the most well known. I think there's also been a sort of tacit assumption with games for a long time that the more 'hd' they are the more expressive they can be, and this challenges that on so many fronts: So many ways that this game expresses itself wouldn't be possible with a lot of the 'advances' in game design. If the combat was 1:1 realistic, the opportunity for characters to express themselves through their attacks would be lost, if there was voice acting the many tricks played with text sound, scrolling speed, and music would be lost, if items were all represented graphically most of the jokes behind them would be lost, etc. It's a fantastic argument for how a game can more fully express itself when it's abstracted away from literal representation. So maybe I'll write about that too. That's probably a fresher take.

It does seem to have been linked! I've had a few linked recently, which is real nice tbh didn't really consider it an especially strong piece which is why I didn't link it here. Like I said, there's so much going on with the game I find it really difficult to drill down on one thing to talk about.

So I'm kinda late on this one but this game is kind of amazing? Incredibly detailed, pushes the boundaries of storytelling in games in so many little ways... depending on how you play it, one of the most genuinely funny and charming RPGs or one of the most genuinely unnerving horror games out there. There's so much going on here it's hard to talk about any one thing that's especially amazing. Though it's not really perfect, it has some pacing issues and some communication issues, it's outstanding and innovative in so many respects I find it hard to hold those against it in the long term.

Regarding taking time to slow down and appreciate the world of the game, I think Dark Souls deserves a mention here for two reasons. One is that, because the map is more or less continuous, about 90% of the time if you notice something cool in the distance that's someplace you'll be later in the game, so there's actually a tiny but significant bit of gameplay reason to be paying attention to the environment. The other is that the messaging system actually has a message just to say 'glorious view' which, when not being used for saucy jokes, can actually often make one take a moment to look around and say "you know what? Yeah. That is nice."

Man. Y'all can do what you want but I must admit I'm not wild about the reasoning. That period of many and variable hosts felt like one of the most vital and exciting stages the cast has been in, and it's disappointing to hear that any casts like that are being explicitly avoided in the future.