Argobot

I'm gearing up for a cross-country road trip, and this thread is giving me some ideas of tourists traps I should stop at. I'm also one of those people who has only experienced the West and East Coast and have very limited experience with the Midwest, so the trip should be fun (is what I'm telling myself every time I contemplate driving for a few days across empty fields and balls of twine).

I'd say it's actually more legally problematic now. The DOMA decision basically allows gay people in states where gay marriage is legal, to enjoy all the benefits that married couples usually receive (federal health insurance being a big one). Where it starts to get confusing is when a gay couple who were married in one state, move to another where gay marriage is not legal or has a constitutional ban. It's not clear yet if they will be able to carry over their rights to a different state, that's something the Obama admin is going to have to legally define in the next few months. So everything just became that much more complicated. Of course, the obvious solution is to just legalize gay marriage federally, and I'm sure that once one gay couple sues because they lost health insurance coverage after moving to a gay marriage state to a non, we as a country will get that much closer to finally legalizing gay marriage nationwide. E: Also, a majority of Americans now support gay marriage, so the issue has become less problematic in that regard, at least.

I read this and loved it. Some of the best writing on being a youngish woman that I've read in a long time.

But when I read a book, I'm going to have a different interpretation than you or I'm going to experience the book in a different way. All stories, whether they're told in a game or in a book, have these little deviations from the prescribed narrative path that are based on the individual's unique experience. That deviation may be more apparent in games, but it happens just as frequently in other story-telling mediums.

Shooters can have good stories and still get away with the player murdering all the dudes. It just depends on what the story is. Too many recent shooters are trying to have these very realistic, very emotional stories that make absolutely no sense when paired with the 'shoot everyone' mechanic. You can't have that realism and a high body count; it's too disingenuous and a little insulting. The Last of Us wants to be a story about a man and a young girl building a familial relationship together, but its typical shooter mechanics adds a second, unintentional narrative that detracts from the primary story. Maybe shooters by their mechanical nature will also be super violent. I hope that's not true, but maybe it is. But if the super violence is something we have to accept about shooters, then maybe big developers should consider different gameplay mechanics to tell their stories with.

Except, the very fact of being a game, means that games do not tell stories in the same way that books do, just like movies don't tell stories in the same way as books. Unless you're talking about linear narrative or the basic structure of rising action, climax, denouement, but even then all three mediums employ this basic method of story-telling in vastly different ways. When I talk about story in games, I'm not talking about the game basically pausing itself to give the player narration. I'm talking about the world/characters/environment in a game and the way that the player interacts with those things through the game's mechanics. A game like Journey (which is probably an overused example, but whatever), tells a story with zero narration. It's not a book, because it relies entirely on visuals, but it's also not a movie, because the other half of the narrative puzzle comes from how the player interacts with the world of the game. I really do believe that big triple A shooters can accomplish that same kind of effective story-telling, if they learn how to pair the story with the mechanics, and not treat them like separate entities.

But what would Mario without a story look like to you? Do you mean that there just wouldn't be an text stating 'save the princess' but all the typical Mario visuals would still be there? Because it would be pretty easy to create story from the visuals alone in Mario, in fact, the visuals are the primary source for the narrative, since textual narrative is fairly rare in most Mario games. If you mean that Mario without story would be a game stripped of all the familiar Mario visuals (so just blocks jumping on other blocks) then that sounds like an incredibly dull game. Zeus did just say that.

I would say for an example like Mario that the gameplay and the story work perfectly together; neither detracts from the goal of the other and neither is primary. The idea that games can't have complex and meaningful stories like books and movies is extremely upsetting to me. That's a really limited way to look at games and I would hope that most people want and expect games to deliver on the same story-telling level as other mediums. A good game story doesn't need to be told all through exclusively through cutscenes, well-implemented mechanics can go a long way in reinforcing and even adding to a story. But if the mechanics are there to just pad out the game's length or to fulfill players' expectations of what a game needs to be, then I think they serve no purpose and seriously harm what the game is trying to do.

I guess I just fundamentally approach games in a different way, because I would never consider gameplay as the primary component. In a perfect word, narrative and gameplay would work together to provide meaning and entertainment to the player. The story should be helped by the game's mechanics, not an excuse for them.

Is the idea then that people will only buy a $60 game if the dollar per hour ratio is deemed as economically worthwhile? Why is it so unbelievable that someone would willingly pay $60 for 4-6 hours of entertainment, especially when people are routinely paying $60 for a game that they will only play 4-6 hours of, even if the game length is 3x that. If big budget games want to have a narrative that carries meaning then they need to seriously consider abandoning the video game-y aspects that are limiting the effectiveness of the stories game developers claim they want to tell.

I wish that games were subject to the kind of editing that movies and books get. It's great if the gameplay reinforces the game's central narrative, but stretching that gameplay out over several unnecessary hours will generally start to weaken the game's point, not strengthen it. Succinct storytelling is almost always preferable to long, drawn-out repetition, and it sounds like The Last of Us gets to bogged down in the latter.

I changed my mind. My favorite Coen bros film is the 20 minute dybbuk scene at the beginning of A Serious Man.

I actually like their Ladykillers remake....

I'll have to rewatch Barton Fink, but I disagree that later Coen stuff is more misanthropic. Blood Simple is a depressingly nihilistic movie, on par with A Serious Man, at least for me. Maybe I'll just watch all the Coen bros movies in a row, to better judge the progression of bleakness in their career (oh man that sounds like a horrible idea).

I would say so. Burn After Reading is a really close second for me, but A Serious Man is so perfect, so Coen. I absolutely love it.

I'm so glad someone mentioned the Battlestar Galactica style of 'let's preview the episode you are about to watch so we can ruin any enthusiasm you might have about watching the episode.' I came to the series late, so I watched about 3 seasons worth of episodes in a few weeks time. While the pre-trailers don't explicitly spoil anything, they do reveal enough that I could usually guess where the episode was headed, which is a bummer, and slightly ruined my marathon watch. I can't remember if the show eventually dropped the pre-trailers or if I just got really good at starting the episode right after they finished.

I'm sure that they are nice guys in real life and that none of these comments are born out of actual malice, but the regularity of these kinds of comments from PA has started to wear me down. I had hoped that the whole Dickwolves controversy would be a one time thing, but they continue to use the rather large platform they've been given to say some truly ignorant stuff. You can forgive that up to a point, but I would hope that two grown men who are in charge of a successful business would learn when to keep their mouths shut or how not to have gross opinions. The Fullbright Company is doing a very cool thing here and I wish them all the success in the world. I've been to the past two PAX East conferences and have tickets to PAX Prime, but this whole debacle is seriously making me question why I would to go to another one of these conventions.

For me, Wolf Hall is about the many ways men gain power and hold on to it. Wosley and Thomas Moore are both examples of how holding onto your religious ideals may give you moral superiority but it may also cost you your life, and Cromwell and Henry are examples of brute but effective pragmatism. There's also elements of family relationships, women's sexuality and power, and the developing political history of Great Britain. A lot is packed into this book, but because these themes aren't that grandiose or explicit, it's easy to ignore them. I recently read John le Carré's novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which you could very easily describe as being a book that's just about a spy who solves a mystery. That's a gross simplification of everything that happens in the book, of course, but writers like le Carré and Mantel do a great job of weaving theme into narrative without making the former overly explicit or hamfisted. It works as a standalone, but reading Bring up the Bodies (and hopefully the third book) brings more of these ideas to the foreground.

Exactly. That's a great way of summing up what I was trying to say.

The Walking Dead is the Walking Dead of graphic novels; The Walking Dead is the Walking Dead of best downloadable game; The Walking Dead is the Walking Dead of Dishonored.

Hmm, maybe I need to rewatch Love and Death. I don't remember liking it very much, certainly not more than Sleeper.

Bananas.

It all kind of reminds me of this one scene in this movie:

I probably should have said: some women like men to be chivalrous and some don't care. The 'holding the door' example breaks down really quickly and makes you start sounding like a crazy person who hates door-holders.

I didn't see it as a downplay, more of an admission that it's a weird thing to get overly excited about, because it's something Nintendo should have been doing for years.