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Also, that quote. New low indeed.

Yeah the whole apology thing is weird. As you said, I get when politicians do it. But outside of that public apologies often feel unseemly to me, especially in the context of one being issued at the behest of another party. I work in trademark law, and I know when we find infringing parties in South Korea, for example, part of the settlement terms frequently involves issuing a public apology for the trademark infringement. And I guess that is just part of the legal culture there, but we would never imagine doing that in the U.S. You just stop the infringement and pay out some money and it's all water under the bridge at that point. Really, I think the demand for an apology is like looking for some sort of justification that it isn't about harassment. And its always been too late for that.

He didn't come off as egotistical to me. His accomplishments are impressive, and he was directly asked about his contributions to these games, so yeah, he's going to say what he brought to the table. What he said he accomplished comports with what I've read about his contributions from other Blizzard employees.

Probably has something to do with the fact that it doesn't read like something a human being would have written?

This is an outrage, if we can't trust @dogboner who can we possibly trust?

Also yeah, the succubus thing, man. There was some article not too long ago about DOTA 2 that was mostly positive but did point out that some of the community kind of sucked, and some of the portrayal of women heroes were less than great. And of course the DOTA 2 subreddit lost their shit, and were like, that writer is an idiot Queen of Pain is a succubus so of course she's like that. And like, I sort of get how they're defensive about that because as far as I can tell out of all the fantasy stuff I've ever seen, DOTA 2 is probably the smallest offender, but I would also argue that's not a particularly impressive accomplishment considering the competition. And yeah, QoP is a succubus, but it could have been anything (why not an incubus, for example?)

That last point is incredibly important I think. Most women I know found it just a tad annoying that something as egregious as Dragon's Crown for a lot of dudes to finally observe that female sexualization in games is pretty over the top.

It was hard to refrain from laughing when I saw Tim boldly make the claim that the patriarchy is just not a concept that exists in France. I suppose his line of thinking is that because they don't venerate John Wayne it must not be something that affects French people at all. It reminds me of a dinner party I went to where a Parisian couple were in attendance, and complaining about how awfully racist Americans are. When I pointed out how I saw a bunch very visible and ugly anti-immigration demonstrations when I visited Paris in 2008, the woman responded that they weren't anti-immigrant in Paris, they just wanted foreigners to behave more like the French. I also love the irony that Tim appears to have completely missed the point of Leigh Alexander's "gamers are over" article.

I'm currently stuck in the medical center. It is a pretty shit level design. I've been forcing myself to give up for the day after getting killed 3 times so I don't get horribly frustrated with the game, but it does mean this is taking an absurd amount of time to get through the area.

Ever since I found out about GOG I've been hoping for the appearance of Blade Runner, although I imagine the licensing for that one has to be particularly difficult.

I think that Mother Jones article does the thing that so many journalists are guilty of when reporting on studies from the social sciences, and ignoring that correlation is not causation. Also, every study I'm familiar with that links video games to aggressive behavior has only observed short term effects so on top of that there also appears to be a lot of overstating the case about what these studies actually demonstrate.

Oh yeah, it's textbook right-wing radio material where you have these radio hosts complaining about how women and minorities are engaging in "special pleadings" while simultaneously complaining about how really it's white men that have it tough. People brought up Brad Wardell, and he seems to trade in a tremendous amount of that sort of rhetoric.

It's interesting that turtling is the go to strategy for so many people in strategy games. I used to turtle when playing board games like Eclipse and Game of Thrones, and other types of games that involve expansion & development, but also have conflict as a constant risk. I don't know what happened, but at a certain point something snapped in my brain and I learned to start taking more risks by starting conflicts that I might not win. I think it has to do with how our brains overvalue things we might potentially lose. You kind of have to remind yourself you are playing a game sometimes. I think you end up doing a lot better at most games once you get over that psychological hurdle. So I definitely agree with Rob's philosophy of kind of nerfing defensive strategies, and think it makes good design sense to nudge the player towards less reactive play styles.

On the topic of what is the appeal or draw to the game, it just occurred to me that this game sucks people in the same way a good Lords Management game does. The game is initially a bit inscrutable, with a ton of different systems to learn and get the hang of. Every hero/job is like a new way to play the game, and the combination of these heroes (both typically around 5) makes each battle constantly feel new and interesting. That feeling that you are constantly learning new things keeps the game endlessly interesting.

So I have to ask, when can we expect to see part 2 released?

I've definitely enjoyed FFT on the iPad, but I do wish they could have simplified the interface for it. There's an awful lot of tapping involved for fairly simple procedures. In a post XCOM world it feels very clunky (although to be fair that's true for a lot of older tactical games too, including the original X-COM). Still, phenomenal game with an incredible amount of variety.

Endless Legend, and Dungeon of the Endless both have their hooks in me pretty deep.

This was such a great discussion. I barely know where to begin, but I guess one thought that immediately leaps out is about the discussion about rushing strategies, and why they were so divisive. I remember playing a lot of the C&C games, Warcraft 1 & 2, and a whole lot of Total Annihilation. Rushing was always a source of a lot of heated debate. Like, a turtling strategy could be really annoying to deal with, but rushing occupied this special place in the discourse surrounding the balance of RTS, and I think it basically had to do with anxiety about a dominant strategy precluding other sorts of strategies that might otherwise be viable. Rob's answer for how to deal with a rush strategy is absolutely correct, you just need to recon properly and compensate, but back then I think most of us playing those games only had a basic and crude intuitive sense of recon strategies. Certainly you weren't going to learn anything valuable from playing the AI.

Latrine - to be fair when I was talking about science fiction, I was more thinking along the lines of space opera-y stuff, and not like hard sci-fi or anything like that. But I can't even think of any 4X game where that's a theme (Alpha Centauri probably comes closest, but it's still pretty out there in terms of within the realms of possibility stuff). And I was specifically talking about 4X games, and not like literature, movies, or even other genres of video games.

Hey I guess I'm way late to this, but finally got around to watching the episode, and listening to the cast. I'm really glad you brought up the scene early on with the new girl. I also loved her acting in that scene with all the uncomfortable tics of anxiety on display. It reminds me of Monica Vitti's performance in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert. Her acting for a scene that is depicting such a raw and emotionally disturbing event is such a striking contrast to the very next scene with James and Donna which is way overacted for such a cheesy, phony love scene.

!!!

Yeah, for reasons Chris articulated on the most recent Idle Thumbs episode I will never get as excited about sci-fi and fantasy 4X games as I do with historically themed ones, but I do have to give credit to Amplitude to doing a much better job with at least making EL's world more interesting than the typical fantasy or sci-fi 4X (at a minimum, it's a huge improvement over Endless Space).

I guess I'm probably in the minority here, but I couldn't stand Payday 2 (never played the first one). I basically found it to be a video game ass video game, and super immersive breaking. I definitely never had the feeling Sean described of feeling like I was in an awesome heist movie. Instead I felt like some idiot holding down the F key or whatever waiting for the various buckets to fill up, and shooting ten million cops since so many of the stealth systems felt weird and finnicky so carefully laid plans always got messed up really badly. I gave up after about 4 tries with the game. My friends kept insisting that the game gets better as you progress along the skill tree, but I don't have the patience for that. The game didn't give me anything cool to work with right off the bat, and I can't handle having to grind or whatever to get to what is allegedly good about the game.

So you can buy this game on Steam now. I am definitely excited to check it out after all the good things everyone on Idle Thumbs has had to say about the game. I noticed in the description that it says it supports 1 to 4 players. Can someone who has played the game elaborate how that works?

You said ". . . but it is such a terrible thing to consider that these jokes and emotional, instead of rational, shots at GG could be causing more harm than good?" That is strongly suggestive that we should be engaging in rational argument. Maybe you misspoke. This is the research I'm familiar with as far as all this stuff about "persuasiveness" goes: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney Crucially, yeah jokes aren't going to win anyone over to your position, but neither are rational arguments. The article suggests (without really having any strong proof one way or the other) that who provides the argument makes a big difference (which sounds correct on an intuitive level, but isn't really something anyone has in their toolkit generally), and appealing to someone's values. Again, that's a sensible idea but maybe not so easy to execute in practice. I'm sure women all over the world would love to figure out a way to make appeals to people that hold deeply held sexist beliefs to not behave in such a sexist way.