sclpls

Also good: Reddit is a failed state http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/8/6121363/reddit-is-a-failed-state

I'm glad other people are drawing the parallel to this misogynistic movement and what's described in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". https://medium.com/@handler/the-paranoid-style-in-gaming-misogyny-1d412f212bda

Yeah I have to admit I've given up on the idea of engagement. I saw that storify thing featuring Brett Douville. You might read it and feel a little bit better about humanity. Then you go ahead and click on the link to his twitter interlocutor to see what he's been up to since that was posted, and you decide everything can go fuck off.

Oh hi. I was hoping to synergize with your marketing strategy by submitting to the warm glow of Big Data, but I don't know how to answer because what is video games?

Here's a pretty entertaining match that Chris Thursten (who is on the Venomancer? I Hardly Know Her team in the Rektreational) played, and then subsequently cast with his friend Marsh Davies, who knows next to nothing about DOTA. It's a great format because that basically means Chris is spending the entire time explaining what is cool or interesting about the game. As an added bonus, it was a pretty amazing match!

Thanks for the tip!

I kind of like later Simpsons episodes. Like stuff from the season 11-15 range (I think I stopped watching beyond that so I make no claim about later later Simpsons episodes). I will not deny that the show got stupider, and more incredulous. But they also featured a ton of amazing, super subtle jokes. It was like everything got amplified around that period: the dumb jokes got really dumb, and the subtle jokes got really subtle. The earlier episodes had a much better balance as far as that stuff goes, and deserve to be called classics, but personally there is stuff I like about the Simpsons past its prime (up to a point!)

Some tabletop games are much more conducive to expansions than others. Netrunner, Dominions, Cosmic Encounters, etc. work well because they are essentially decks of cards. The problem with Arkham Horror is that there is just so much stuff! I try to stick to a rule of only buying one expansion. The Carcassone situation is ridiculous though. Someone gave me the Big Box as a birthday present one year, and that thing is ridiculously large. You would look at it and think that's all the expansions, but nope! Not even close!

Yeah, the internet gets weird ideas in its head about censorship. We see this over and over again every time a comedian makes a horrible rape joke and gets called out for it, and other comedians rush to the offending comedian's defense with lines about how important it is not to censor anything. It seems like there is this confusion between government censorship and private censorship. Ironically, the First Amendment has a line that the government shall not prohibit people's right to assemble freely. Stated in plain language, the First Amendment explicitly enshrines the concept of private censorship. One thread I've seen in the gamergate hashtag is equating these feminist critiques of sexism in games with critiques of violence in video games, and how if violent video games don't make people violent, surely sexist imagery in video games don't make people sexist. Set aside for a moment that these angry internet denizens typically deny that games are sexist at all, and set aside that violence is an action whereas sexism is a set of attitudes. I wish people would appreciate the difference between the actual critics being discussed. Because whereas there have been several actual efforts to lobby governments to restrict violence in video games, or the sale of such games to people, there has been no comparable effort on the part of feminist critics to try and lobby to restrict sexism in games. So I'm not sure where this idea of censorship is coming from other than from severe confusion.

Treasure(d) goblins

Enjoyed the Rektreational game today. Seeing Nick Breckon trapped by his own teammate's serpent wards was a special kind of DOTA event.

Haha yes I was just making puns, I enjoyed the interview quite a bit. Sorry for the confusion!

The irony just dawned on me that a campaign that has been coordinated on 4chan is demanding more transparency from other outlets.

I played techies tonight. It was funny, that is all.

Very nice piece

hahaha

Hahaha I think I had a similar thought chain. I loved the description of moving through poisonous gas in some SNES era RPG. That Ubisoft thing reinforced that I'm not sure I could handle going to video game conventions.

I was gonna ask this during the stream, unfortunately I only ended up catching the tail end, but has there been any discussion about what the dialog system is going to be like in this game? I know there has been discussion about this on the podcast, and I'm sure Jake & Sean discussed these sorts of things while at Telltale, but I was wondering if there was going to be any sort of different approach to it?

Really excellent Q&A show. Both great questions and answers. I think my question maybe wasn't the most interesting, but it got the ball rolling, and I thought you guys did a great job of answering it. If you guys do decide to ever do a Pikman episode you absolutely need to get Jake Rodkin on the show. You guys are so close to completing Idle Thumbs guest Bingo! I also have an answer for you to Troy's question about games too small in scope. I definitely remember the episode about Blendo games' Flotilla and Atom Zombie Smasher, and people wishing the games weren't quite so tight in scope. Finally, since you're asking, yes, I'd be happy to give money to a patreon to make the show easier to produce for you guys.

I'm not sure there were really any hot scoops in this interview though. Video games was just mentioned in passing.

Love Letter is a great game. There are a number of board games by Japanese game designers that similarly feature a minimal amount of components but nonetheless have very deep gameplay, and as someone that lives in a small apartment and doesn't have a ton of room for board games I love them. Cheaty Mages, 8 Minute Empire, and Sail to India are the ones that spring to mind immediately.

It's like a view of morality from Fallout 3 or something.

Yeah I guess that's the problem I've had with ability draft. I've never actually played it, but when I've watched videos it never looked very fun.

I was recently rereading Italo Calvino's diary from when he was travelling through America in 1960 (during the Kennedy-Nixon election), and he observed that despite the Italian unions having all the right political critiques of capitalism they had less to show for it than the unions in San Francisco. That's neither here nor there, but that quote reminded me of that passage. You are on the nose as far as the video game industry sharing that Hollywood style liberalism. It's a sort of focus-tested-to-death style world view with vaguely spiritual ideas about good and evil where people are capable of individual feats of greatness and the cast has a sort of bland multiculturalism. I think the reason you don't see labor issues discussed as much as say, feminist issues is just a question of power blocs. As you stated, we're living in the era of deregulation, and American labor laws and the regulation of those laws are basically stacked against unions.There are a lot of industries that in other decades probably would unionize, but it is nearly impossible to do so now. The chances of prevailing are so low, and the risks of workers losing their jobs are so high that no one risks it. There was some hope among labor groups that when there was Democratic control of the WH and both chambers of congress that there would be a chance of passing laws implementing card check systems for organizing unions. That didn't happen, Democrats focused their energy on other issues like passing a stimulus bill and healthcare, and when Republicans took back the House in 2010 the ship for that sailed. As such labor doesn't have much of a voice in any conversation. Women, by contrast, have been very successful using social media to organize and give voice to their concerns. Often if politicians and companies do things to alienate them they do so at their potential peril. By contrast, politicians and companies can have anti-labor views and practices without any real consequence. So people discuss labor issues less frequently as a result. That being said, I do think labor issues get discussed in outlets. Crytek was rightly criticized last month when it came to light that some staff had gone two months (!) without pay. Game journalists do have to be more cautious with those kinds of allegations however because they can potentially come back to harm their sources, and they need to make sure the allegations are factual less they risk liability. By contrast, accusations of sexist representations fits more comfortably within the realm of subjective critique, and therefore doesn't require the same sorts of caution to expose. I think a final issue, and one that I think you are alluding to, is certain American cultural dispositions. Polls show that lots of Americans don't know anyone that is a union member, and that has an impact on how people think about issues. Americans also have much fuzzier views of class differences compared to many other people. That's another reason labor issues are perhaps discussed less frequently, and represented so poorly in games and other media. I can't think of any games off the top of my head that get labor right, but I've often thought while sending another XCOM squad to their doom that they really ought to organize considering the types of risks they are taking. I don't think I've ever paid them after the initial trivial fee!