sclpls

Hmm yeah good point, there isn't any network you're hooking up to that would track achievements, but that could change in the future perhaps...

I picked up my copy of the Grim Fandango Remaster (finished last night!) through GOG, and can report that there are no achievements in that version. So if this is an important issue for you, there's some useful information for you.

I think Sean was just simplifying things rather than getting into minutiae of how it works since the rest of the cast doesn't play DOTA.

Yeah, I think grabbing Arx Libertatis was probably going to be my next move if the things I had tried hadn't worked out, and I would probably recommend it to other people since the reports have been good, and setting up the original game was kind of a pain in the ass.

I've experienced that with Apple's podcast app. It is quite possibly the biggest piece of garbage I have ever downloaded for my iphone.

Man yeah, I'm also not crazy about what the Steam front page looks like too. That may unconsciously be affecting my impression of Valve being lost in the weeds at the moment. The only recent thing they've rolled out recently that I think is cool is the streaming feature. It's nice to pop into other people's games and chat for a bit.

Rich Geldreich is a former Valve employee, and he wrote a blogpost recently that was super critical of open office designs for large companies that was also implicitly critical of Valve's organizational structure. http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-cabal-rooms-suck.html While we all can only speculate on what's going on with Valve, it definitely appears to be the case that they are incredibly successful company now because Steam operates as a rent collection system, and that means they don't have to address the kinds of inefficiencies in their organization that a company that lacks a money hose would have to handle at various points in time if they wanted to keep their doors open. I do hope that the feeling that a lot of cool Valve stuff has stalled out is just a temporary bottleneck.

To be honest I haven't played the original System Shock since the early 90s so I have no idea (the original Thief and System Shock 2 are the games I seem to replay regularly). It is certainly worth giving a shot at some point. For now though I am excited to play this UU spiritual successor. One thing I am really digging oddly enough is the slightly clunky interface by today's standards. In the Bioshock or Dishonored games everything happens really quickly. There are a lot of advantages to that because I think it makes those games easier to get into, and they are pretty exciting as action games. But they lose part of the charm of the older style of games where the game is running in real time, but selecting an item from the inventory takes some time, for example. It has a slower pace which puts me in a more curious contemplative headspace. It'll be interesting to see what they do with this new game. Obviously I do hope for some interface improvements, but I hope they proceed somewhat conservatively.

This is super dorky, but I had a hard time getting to sleep last night thinking about this. I never even played the Ultima Underworld games... I was exposed to Looking Glass studio via System Shock, and after that I bought every game I ever saw from that studio, but I never saw those games. At this point I'm not sure I'm prepared to deal with a game that old, but last night I was inspired and went to work on Arx Fatalis, a game that I had installed awhile back but never gotten to run properly, and after enough messing around with the config file finally managed to get it to work! And it was glorious. All those feelings from all those years back of playing one of Looking Glass' immersive sims came rushing back, and it was so exciting to be playing something like that, and remembering all the things that made those games good. And this kickstarter seems to be doing well, and it makes me happy thinking about how those kinds of feelings are going to be reignited for so many people when this game comes out.

I never played Empire at War, but what people always told me about that game was that the AI was way too passive. Bad AI is a perennial complaint about strategy games, so I've never known how much stock to put into it, but at least with people I've spoken with that's always been the reason it was never listed as one of the great RTS's. I was worried about Grey Goo because of course the first review I read was Tom Chick's. Encouraging to see that people are generally more favorable to the game as everything I've seen has looked good.

I can understand people not being stoked about some of these later episodes, but a lot of them really do cement in my mind what Twin Peaks is "really about" so I think its worth sticking through it even if there are some plot threads that are cheesy and horrible (but then again, what else is new?)

I've been thinking more about the question of aging. The more I think about it, the more I think the question of which ages worse is maybe actually nonsensical, because I think when we talk about something "aging poorly" what we mean is that audience expectations of a thing are different now then when the thing was created. I've been very conscious of this while rewatching Twin Peaks which is an interesting case study because in some ways it was way ahead of its time, and in other ways it was very much of its time which affects what it was like to watch it while it was on the air vs. rewatching it now. The show meets and defies expectations at different moments in time. Is the rate of changes in expectations for games greater or lesser than expectations for movies? Perhaps, but are those expectations tied to something intrinsic to games as a medium, or are they just a byproduct of a naturally changing social environment? That's more difficult to parse out.

I am very hyped for this! It's from the founder of Looking Glass studios!

The experience of every opinion writer I am familiar with is you never know what piece of writing is going to end up striking a chord with people.

I think this Matt Yglesias post gets at the point I was trying to get at much better than I think I was able to do about the ways in which "identity politics" and the rhetoric of "PC discourse" is not a unique thing: http://www.vox.com/2015/1/29/7945119/all-politics-is-identity-politics

That Slate piece is really strong, and provides the right amount of ironic distance in considering these types of intra-political squabbles. I still don't think this is unique to "PC" culture, but is just a common feature of human society (in Europe for much of its history there are questions about whether someone is sufficiently Christian enough, the question of whether someone was sufficiently communist under Stalin or Mao was a life or death question, McCarthyism in the 1950s, how much blackness exists within a person was a question of extraordinary legal importance in the pre-Civil War era American South, etc. I always find it frustrating that Americans frequently like to complain about this stuff as if we are impervious to the forces of history). I do think, barring any actual involvement in a particular political struggle, it is a mistake to cast one's lot with the radical or the moderate wing of a party. Both are needed to effect political change in a good cop/bad cop sort of dynamic. I also like that the Slate piece really interrogated what counts as being reasonable. Because of my legal background I'm keenly aware of how "reasonableness" as a way to evaluate things is a bit of a weasel word to avoid the tricky task of thinking through thorny problems (admittedly at times for very reasonable purposes).

Also, also, also (I'll try and take a break from the subject after this) I thought this vox article was pretty good. http://www.vox.com/2015/1/28/7930845/political-correctness-doesnt-exist

So I just wanted to point out this article in the Nation that is a year old at this point, and is basically discussing many of the the same issues that appear in that Chait article, but I feel like this article approaches it with more careful nuance compared to Chait who I feel badly overstates his case by dialing it dangerously close to "Clash of Civilizations" style rhetorical flourish. http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars?page=0,0

We may have to agree to disagree on this point, but I truly don't believe that unconsidered criticisms and overblown infractions were a previously uncommon feature of left-wing discourse (in the 1960s the SDS eventually turns into the Weather Underground, or there is Mao's "Combat Liberalism" pamphlet), and generally speaking I think it is a part of all intra-political debate, on the left as well as the right. Chait argues that this current discourse is dangerously illiberal, but I'm struck by how relatively tame and moderate it is. It is mostly just a bunch of people talking... forever. So to that extent he is correct that it is exhausting, but that's simply a feature of people's endless appetite for discussion without synthesis or resolution. People need to learn how to disengage.

Honestly I feel like this last point is way more valuable than Chait's article where I think he correctly identified some unfortunate parts of our political discourse, but failed to really lay out any effective argument about how "PC" discourse is unique or exceptional in its shallowness or poorly considered responses. Shallow thinking abounds everywhere. The way so many internet conversations are organized - twitter, reddit, tumblr, 4chan, etc. - are analogous to the open-office craze that has consumed American businesses, and they are bad organizations for discourse for the same structural reasons. Although I'm generally reluctant to engage in the sort of self-congratulatory pat on the back that you see from time to time in smaller forums such as this one, in this case I think it is warranted. The level of discourse you are going to see in smaller forums like this is going to be vastly superior to larger spaces. When the scale of discourse is more contained it makes it easier for people with higher than average social and emotional intelligence to operate, and this has been shown in studies to elevate the social and emotional intelligence of the whole group. But in big open groups this affect gets drowned out and everyone is worse off for it. And sometimes people become less willing to speak up. But this isn't a problem with "PC" culture (not wanting to offend women simply for being women or gay people for being gay, etc. is a good thing!), it's just a problem of big groups of people. This is also, in a tangential sort of way, part of why I think reading literature, especially literature from another period of time written by someone with a very different background from your own, is uniquely valuable to our intellect. It's a way of short circuiting the gross assumptions of our own social environment.

Thanks for linking that medium piece Sean wrote. I experience similar feelings when it comes to soccer and the horrible cesspool that is FIFA.

Well I did my good deed, and on another messageboard I was singing the praises of the Grim Fandango remaster, and convinced a couple of people to pre-order a copy.

I think your reasoning throughout this discussion has mostly been solid, but this doesn't strike me as true. Apologies for the syllogisms here, but when a dentist fills a cavity it can cause pain, so is therefore the procedure immoral? Similarly there is emotional pain. If I breakup with my significant other, I am causing that person pain. Is it wrong therefore to break up with people? I am certain we all have the same moral intuition that the answer to these questions is no. So what is the correct standard then? Is it don't cause pain unless it serves a purpose? But that is problematic because then nearly any pain aside from that committed by sociopaths could be justified, including the slaughter of animals for purpose of eating. Is it don't cause pain unless the pain has been consented to by the victim? That might justify the example of the dentist, but it wouldn't justify the breakup, and it wouldn't justify a necessary medical procedure to someone in a coma (for instance), or protect animals who are unable to give consent. Is it don't cause pain unless the alternative would cause a greater pain? I suspect this might be a moral calculus that you subscribe to (maybe not), but I don't really like this answer either because it leads to even murkier concepts in my mind. I have no answers, I'm just mulling this all over at the moment.

I want to play holo board games.

I don't know if I agree with everything Sean had to say about all the cheating stuff, but I think I agree with his points broadly. Rampant cheating really does end up poisoning our cultural values. That being said, I do think money has a lot to do with it in many cases, how could it not? That is always going to have an impact on the incentives people face regardless of what action they end up choosing. But it isn't just about money. I think it was PC Gamer that did a deep dive into an examination of the people that buy hacks for a game like CS:GO, and examined why people cheat at these games. For a lot of people, it seems, it simply comes down to a thrill. It's very difficult to wrap our head around for all the people that have no interest in cheating. But essentially for some people that's just how they get their kicks. Here's the article: http://www.pcgamer.com/hacks-an-investigation-into-aimbot-dealers-wallhack-users-and-the-million-dollar-business-of-video-game-cheating/