Problem Machine

I think if you just edit the post you started the thread with the option's there edit: just checked, and that works but you have to use the full editor

I mean, yeah, but isn't that kinda what we thought with Obama?

Right, yeah, that's the kind I'm used to, not this kind of incredibly overt and violently hostile racism.

I mean, I knew America was racist, but up until relatively recently I thought we had the good grace to be ashamed of it.

Regardless of whether that was your intent I think that is often a tone people take and is a point worth making

Aand now that he feels he has the nomination down he's centering :|

It helps that all of the other republican candidates are nearly as terrible

It stopped being funny a while ago, now it's terrifying and surreal. How did we arrive in a world where this is what's happening? How fucking weird is this? What's going on? Are we being punk'd?

I feel like there's an idea just kind of tapping on the door of the above conversations about 5/10 scores that no one's really acknowledging: Average is bad. I know it sounds like a dickbag elitist thing to say, but come on. I refer back to Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. I personally feel like, if anything, that guess is a bit generous -- but whatever, put whichever number you like in there. The corollary is that 80% of everything that's above average is still crap. If review scores were actually supposed to be normalized rankings of all the games that have ever been released, basically every game you've ever played or heard of in any context except for it being extraordinarily awful would probably be in the top 10%. I think 5/10 is an unequivocally bad review. Also, kids, if you're learning a skill, never aspire to be merely above average. Nearly half the people in the world manage that without even trying!

I guess it bothers me a bit because I feel like a lot of people use Jon Blow as a cipher to represent the general idea of either the egotistical auteur or the oblivious tech dude. It feels like noting him down as a jerk isn't just saying "this dude rubs me the wrong way" but an act with a perhaps unintended political purpose of assigning him a role within the way of the world... He doesn't have to be House! House isn't a real thing!

Yeah I dunno it feels like having zero unconsidered or inconsiderate opinions is an absurd bar to have to jump to be considered not a jerk.

Take a game like Super Hexagon: To play Super Hexagon is to be learning the skill that is Super Hexagon and not much else. In many ways it has even less in the way of explicit reward than The Witness does, since it's impossible to truly complete it. And yet the idea of someone criticizing that game for not training an externally viable skill is kind of ludicrous. To do so would be to challenge the core idea that games can be a worthwhile activity at all, which is a reasonable challenge to make if you want to make it but not a reasonable assertion to sneak under the radar as axiomatic, especially in the format of a video games podcast. You're talking about difficulty curve here, but what does that have to do with whether a game is teaching a skill or not? That sounds like more of a matter of methodology than of results. Is the issue that The Witness wants you to learn but doesn't want to teach? Then make that criticism! Is the issue that The Witness requires a big investment of intellectual rigor for what feels like a too-small payoff? Then make that criticism. But saying it's teaching you a skill that you will never use, something fundamentally true of all games, isn't a criticism of The Witness, it's a criticism of the idea of video games -- and, by extension, any activity that isn't purely aimed at productivity.

I think that difficult being an okay thing for games to be now comes from three places. First, right around the 360 era you guys mention where everything just got incredibly watered down and boring is when the indie scene really started taking off, most notably I think with Braid and Super Meat Boy, both very challenging games. After these came Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac, which really established a trend in indies of allowing for challenging and unforgiving games, and once it was established that these were formulas that could be successful I think AAA publishers became much more open to the idea of challenging design. Second was Demon's Souls, which I definitely think was more cause than effect with this trend since From Software has been making these kinds of games for basically as long as they've been making games. In fact, I suspect a big part of the reason why Chris compares it to early PS2 games is because From Software was one of the earliest devs on the scene when the PS2 came out, releasing Eternal Ring, Evergrace, and Armored Core 2 pretty much on launch. Armored Core 2 is a giant robot game rather than an RPG, but Evergrace especially shares a lot of the Souls games game design sensibilities, though it has a very different aesthetic -- one which is actually pretty striking in its own right. Anyway, similar to the indie games mentioned above, Souls came out of nowhere and became hugely popular, another data point showing that audiences can be willing to accept difficult and obscure games. Third, I think it has to be a factor that that era of gaming just fucking sucked. It sucked so bad. Around 2007 or 2008 I'd been spending years studying programming and whatnot pursuant to my dream of creating games, and I was seriously starting to wonder if that was really what I wanted to do because everything about gaming just seemed so fucking dull. Around this time I played Cave Story, and from there I got interested in the indie games scene and it blew my mind. It really opened a door, demonstrated that we could make whatever the fuck we wanted, we didn't have to follow the 'best practices' that were slowly choking the life out of the industry. So yeah. That's why I think we are seeing games that are more demanding now: A game that demands nothing from us offers nothing to us.

I think I addressed that in my second paragraph, but my point is that without that specificity, which I didn't hear anywhere in the conversation, that is a blanket indictment of all games

Wrote this email in response to the show before the discussion topic went up:

I put up a whiteboard and it's helping me feel a lot more like a productive person!

If thinking my writing is nice is wrong I don't want you to be right. But I'd rather you were right in thinking my writing was nice. Regardless, this isn't the write thread.

I think Bojack's animation is better than (what I've seen of) Archer, but still a far cry from the fluidity of rick and morty.

I've never been able to properly learn Go. The terrible AI that already existed could beat me This is cool though. It's exciting to see AI approach problems in a more holistic way rather than brute forcing the problem.

Unfortunately true of a lot of animated shows targeted at adults. As much as I love Bojack Horseman, it also falls into that trap a lot of the time. They've put more effort into it recently, but early Venture Bros also often had that problem.

Rick and Morty is very well animated, but that doesn't mean it's not ugly. It definitely dives facefirst into grotesque in a very intentional way. Actually, honestly, Adventure Time does something very similar a lot of the time. I haven't seen Archer but everything I've seen looks a lot like Frisky Dingo, which was very cheaply skeletal-animated in a way that didn't look great but was sufficient for the show's needs.

Is that like dehydrated water?

Even though I'd already seen the video, I like to imagine that loud crack is Nick finally getting fed up with trying to get the bear and snapping its neck like a ninja

Yeah I was mostly thinking of the drums. Diablo has pretty distinctive drums