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In this episode Chris suggested that the movie doesn't hold up very well except as a supplement to the book. FWIW I haven't read Pynchon's novel, and saw the movie last night and loved it. I think the difficulty of following some of the plot sequences gives the opportunity for the audience to occupy a similar head space as Doc lost in his own weed haze. The New York Review of Books made a case for why the movie stands on its own, and provisionally at least, it strikes me as compelling. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/jan/03/pynchon-blue-shadow-inherent-vice/ I am very much looking forward to reading the book at some point... maybe after I've had a little bit of distance from seeing the film.

Oh yeah, I remember watching the developer of Gravity Ghost stream the game a month or so ago, and it looked rad. Happy to hear more favorable impressions for something that looked so interesting and promising.

In addition to this being a great interview, I've very much enjoyed the conversation that's been happening on twitter recently, and Frank's advocacy for how to think about formalism in games and why it is important.

There were a number of debatable points in this post, but I just wanted to highlight the comment about no LAN play in DOTA 2, which hasn't been true for at least a year.

This was a fun episode to listen to even though I've never played a game of ASL in my life. I have played the Combat Commander series, and found that to be terrific fun. I think it plays a little bit like ASL reimagined as a card-driven wargame, but listening to the episode it is pretty clear that CC streamlines things a little bit too much, and sacrifices what makes ASL special for the sake of accessibility.

I'm not sure it makes that much sense to talk about League of Legends. They have a different model, but they also have a different sized player base and culture. They are dealing with their own growing pains. http://www.pcgamer.com/league-of-legends-and-the-troubles-with-talent-acquisition/ People sometimes talk about the problem with the competitive DOTA scene as if this is some sort of solved problem, and DOTA is going down some other wrong path. For all e-sports has grown, its still very much the wild west for now. All that being said, this question of all the money going to the very top is an interesting one. I am very curious about what it is like to play in the 16th best DOTA team in the world. What does that person's life look like?

This talk of transformative adaptation just immediately flashed to mind that Fellini short film "Toby Dammit" that was based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story that he never actually read. I don't have any point to make, I always just found it an amusing story.

I'm out of town this weekend, but I'll add you and hopefully we can play a game sometime soon!

I eat meat, but I do think it's wrong to eat meat, and consider it a moral failing on my part.

I think that's a fine idea. I'd be happy to play the game with other people here.

Great discussion! Part of me wonders if Valve should stop doing the International altogether. Letting the community find its own way seems so at odds with the big money tournament that Valve puts on every year. I think TI makes a lot of sense for Valve, it has been the tournament that made me more seriously check out the game. So if I'm typical in anyway then it's a great method of getting new players into the game. But I can't help but wonder if there will be a point in time when it starts holding the game back. Anyway, pure speculation on my part. I think Synderen is totally right that for now the game is still growing and things are getting better.

As far as multiplayer recommendations go, I don't know if this is what people had in mind, but I would suggest checking out Chaos Reborn which is in early access. It is being made by Julian Gollop (of X-COM fame) and is a remake of one of his earlier designs. It hits the sweet spot of not being a huge time commitment (there's a max of 20 turns per game, but in my experience it's usually over way before that, and a turn usually doesn't take much longer than a minute). The game is a turn based wizard battle where you have a random selection of spells, and your turn consists of moving, and casting a spell or attacking. It has an elegant simplicity to it reminiscent of the Firaxis XCOM remake or a really good board game. Between the turn-based nature, the shortness of the matches, and the highly random elements of the game I think it removes a lot of the stress people often associate with multiplayer games even though I think there is a lot of skill and interesting strategy to the game. It also helps that in my experience the community around the game seems very friendly and mature. I think the game is worth consideration, and I suspect it would be up Chris and Sean's alley.

I think a lot of Europeans had similar anxieties about the culture of letter writing in the 18th century. When I read Balzac novels, I see a lot of the same sort of pettiness and gross mob mentality of a lot of his Parisian characters that I associate with people mouthing off on something like Twitter. So I agree with all the criticisms people have with social media stuff. But I think maybe it isn't such a new problem, and ends up being fairly typical of the human experience.

I played a bit this weekend. Thankfully I had no problems. I'm in chapter 5 at this point, and I am maybe not thrilled at how the game is constantly changing up rulesets on me. Also just running through lots of corridors. Hoping the game gets back to opening up a bit.

That makes sense to me. I remember picking up the Xbox 360 port of Torchlight, and vastly preferring playing that game on a controller to mouse and keyboard. It made me really bummed that Torchlight 2 didn't include controller support (but is still the preferable version to play because of co-op and because I don't really use consoles anymore).

P.S. I Love Lucy may not have been the greatest sitcom of all time, but it was certainly the best.

Chris claiming that the Empire Strikes Back revelation isn't the kind of revelation that audiences typically get to experience seems not very correct to me, unless he was talking about in contrast to contemporary movie making practices in which case I agree. But that reveal is of course echoing Oedipus Rex and therefore is a very classic trope of tragedy, and part of what makes those movies so iconic and memorable. But I do very much agree with all the problems with how music is used in so many movies today. Music as cues for what the audience should feel are just as annoying as sitcom laugh tracks, and other blunt techniques that break the "show, don't tell" rule for storytelling.

I'll also second the idea that a video of the Thumbs crew playing Space Alert would be fantastic. I think the whole idea of a game "respecting a player's time" has become a red herring as a concept. I kind of like how Sean expressed it a little more. I tend to think of the problem games have where they haven't figured out what the scope of the game should be. Like, if your game is about being a super powerful hero, it should be about that. I don't want to have to spend 30 or 40 hours until I get to the "real" part of the game. The Talos Principle is a long game. It took me longer to finish it than Portal 2, which I thought was also a fairly long game for a puzzle game. But I didn't mind it because the game was never asking me to do things outside of the scope of what the game is supposed to be about. I think that's really where things fall apart for most games. While I wouldn't mind more short games, I don't think that's the primary issue for a lot of people put off by the length of certain games. It has more to do with all the mechanically useless stuff that creeps its way into games.

I finished this game in 24 hours without consulting any guides (I did use up the three in-game hints though, and only found 3 stars). It is one of my favorite things ever. I'm really surprised by people that didn't like how the environments looked. I wasn't crazy about the Egyptian location, but I loved the rest of it. I want more games to take place in Roman ruins. I ended up having a lot of flashbacks to my last trip to Italy, so that was pretty excellent. I thought the game did a reasonably good job of tackling the basic metaphysical issues it wanted to explore. I can't think of any other game that has really handled philosophical inquiry in any praiseworthy way. It wasn't the deepest dive, but I think that's probably a good creative choice on the developers parts. There are a lot of sweet references for philosophy nerds in the game. I'm always happy to hear people referring to Diogenes Laertius.

So of course my actual GOTY ended up being a game I played after I made up my evaluations of games I had played this year. The Talos Principle ended up being my favorite thing I played this year.

This game is hard.

I think the Desert Fox is the only game I can think of that is worth mentioning that wasn't covered during this episode. It's my favorite so far of all the games Shenandoah Studios have done. It's fresh on my mind because the campaign is basically the perfect length for a flight from one coast to the other which is the flight I have to do during the holidays.

My takeaway from this is sort of analogous to a point Marx use to make about the exploitation of labor. When Marx was critiquing how capitalists exploited the labor of workers, he was careful to point out that he wasn't saying that this social relationship was worse compared to the previous historical relationship between a medieval lord and serf. That was also a social relationship built on the exploitation of one class over another. What changed in this historical shift is the exploitative nature of that relationship became more transparent. In other words, you are right that in the traditional print media there would be less people noticing Sarah's whiteness as a problem, but in the new podcast format this relationship between a white author and the racial minorities that makeup her subject matter, and all the power dynamics it implies, become much more transparent. That doesn't make Sarah a bad person, or wrong for doing the podcast necessarily, but it is certainly a dynamic we ought to be considering more seriously. I mean, surely the events of the past couple of months make that abundantly clear.

I play on too easy. Easy is hard, haha. The current pod I'm playing is armory, and it is crazy how different it plays out because there is so much stuff you can't build. Also if anyone on your team dies that's basically game...

I love it, but it is an odd game so I don't really know what to say to people that don't enjoy it. You can setup control groups like in RTS games. Once I discovered that that really reduced the amount of work involved with micromanagement. That's probably not enough to change your opinion of the game, but I thought I would point it out because it wasn't obvious to me that it's something you can do. Anyway, I really love this game, and its something I play a lot anytime I'm just trying to relax. I find the pacing really appealing, and the way instead of a power curve you have something more like a power pendulum where it swings from you feeling super in control and on top of everything to feeling way overwhelmed. And the way dust works it will swing back and forth from those positions. Very clever.