Problem Machine

Ico is by no means a perfect game, but it felt like a much more compelling environment, largely because it didn't feel constructed solely for me to navigate. It just felt so contrived-- which might not be so bad, except the payoff it was contrived to deliver was completely underwhelming.

Well, I liked Ico. Maybe that's the problem actually: everything just felt like worse Ico.

Maybe! I got bored partway through Trine, but don't remember a disconnect like that, just that it got repetitive.

The problem I have with saying the world is well-realized, though, is that most of the obstacles make ZERO sense within the context of a lived-in world. It's so obviously contrived to provide an obstacle course for exactly two characters that it undermines the reality of the space at every moment.

Yay!

I liked the giant battlefield from a raw aesthetic sense (which I think I mentioned), but the puzzles with pushing a giant arm to chop off another giant arm were so fucking goofy and video gamey I just started cracking up halfway through it.

New piece for this month. Pianoey! Follow the Rain Trails

Ah, yes, Brothers: A Tale of Two Kitties. I didn't like that video game.

I like Skeleton to Skeleton because it sounds like either a communication technology or a skeleton interview show

Oh man that fallback game has become TF2 for me. Before that it was Left 4 Dead. Briefly at one point it was CS: GO. I've heard rumors that companies besides Valve make first person shooters but I haven't seen any confirmation yet. Seriously I've put like 3500 hours into these games. Send help.

really obscure philosopher, you probably haven't heard of him

Hey this is tangential but uh why plaid plaid is ugly solid colors 4 lyfe

I mean the plaid shirts aren't the problem here, they're just a symptom of a homogeneous population of game developers whose mass exerts a gravity-like force of social normalization. I dunno what there is to be done about it beyond acknowledging it and pushing for more diversity, though. Anyway I wear solid-color t-shirts instead of plaid because I don't like patterns so I'm obviously not really part of this problem. I'm sure it'll all work out

It's weird to me that people whose jobs revolve around complex systemic thinking seem to have such a hard time applying those processes to a sociocultural context

I was amazed at the extent to which the article flew over the heads of people who I would otherwise consider to be intelligent. It really goes to show how far the discourse has yet to go. Bleh. edit: Jesus he's Not All Game Developers-ing Leigh Alexander

I'm sorry I cannot explain why I think your approach is counter-productive without using terms that make you feel insulted, but that's kind of an intrinsic problem of criticism. This is the same "I think what you did/said is racist" being heard by the listener as "I think you're a big old shitty racist racist jerk forever" problem that often stymies this kind of discussion, just transported to a different topic.

Hm I didn't mean to imply authority, since I often see the term used in terms of non-official officiousness (the dictionary I checked used 'language policing' as an example), but perhaps it was a bit of a loaded term. Regardless, I think that making judgments about a person's character or ability to speak in an informed way on issues based on tiny samplings of their media consumption habits is generally small-minded and counter-productive. It seems to me the same kind of logic that declares that racism consists of Bad People who do Bad Things, rather than a system we are all complicit in which devalues people based on their race -- a logic that separates things into good and bad based on whether it has been agreed upon to be problematic, and takes that evaluation as the sole relevant measure of merit. A piece of art isn't good or bad, or even progressive or regressive, based solely upon its problematic elements, and having those elements doesn't destroy those merits which it has shown itself to have. Demanding your art be free of cultural baggage seems like a really good way to either enjoy no art ever or to blind yourself to the problematic elements that exist in all art.

Hm yeah, as someone currently too broke to be economically relevant that aspect tends to bypass my thought processes a lot. In general I don't like to think about art in capitalistic terms, but I guess like it or not the marketplace of ideas and the marketplace of, uh, money, are pretty tightly interwoven. Still, as long as a strong preference is shown for things that are less problematic, which I think tends to happen naturally because those things tend to be more interesting, going beyond myopic cliches and building new ideas, progressivism can still be economically selected for. I think the more we expose problematic ideas (and man I need to think of a better word to use there), and the more generally aware people are, the more hunger there will be for ideas that progress beyond them. Making a concerted effort to vote with one's wallet, on top of that, seems redundant.

I'm not sure if that's the intent, but policing people's media consumption habits beyond pointing out their problematic aspects seems kinda gross to me? Sexism and racism and other systemic imbalances are so ingrained in our culture that it's essentially impossible to consume any media that can't be viewed as problematic through one lens or another, and I think it's far more valuable to be open to consuming and interpreting that, and remaining open to the vast history of human culture, than to cloister oneself off to only those media products which we haven't figured out how they're full of fucked up cultural bullshit yet, though someday we probably will. Maybe I'm reading more into the statements than was actually said?

Yeah, except in this case they're not even trying to make a joke out of not giving a shit, they're just not giving a shit.

I'd like to think so, but it didn't seem to be framed that way and I'm not sure what the joke would be in that case: "hey, a character known for being generally on top of things can't remember something that's happened and no one commented on it"? I do like the earlier episodes tendency to portray all of the Simpsons as essentially weirdos, instead of making Marge and Lisa straightlaced if slightly neurotic overachievers and Homer and Bart lazy dummies. Stuff like Lisa's tendency to lose her shit around cute animals and boys overpowering her attempts at social justice, Marge's addictive personality, Bart's fascination with Dickensian stories, and Homer's desperate desire to have the things other families have (which is why he and Flanders were originally foils) made the characters a lot deeper than the generally one-note personalities they have now.

Man, it's just getting zombier and zombier at this point. Oh, I saw an episode yesterday where Homer was betting on football games based on someone's predictions, and Lisa said "that's impossible, no one can consistently predict the outcome of football games." I just thought it was interesting as a particularly brazen ignorance of Simpsons continuity, considering there was an entire episode based around Lisa being able to do just that.

What is the musics?

So you're saying GG are all that kid who plays a game and when they die they say "omg this game is so cheap!"

Man how did you guys posit a blind clown daredevil without making a blindfolded fool reference. I was just waiting for it to happen.