TychoCelchuuu

Why eat any food if you're just going to get hungry again? Why bother waking up in the morning if you'll just fall asleep eventually? Why do anything when we're all going to end up dead anyways?

I'm seeing a lot of stuff on my Facebook wall about how Sanders is a better candidate vs. Trump - he polls better against Trump than Hilary does, he's less hated than Hilary is, he's tapping into the populism/anti-establishmentism stuff that fuels Trump in a way that Hilary isn't, etc. One thing I find interesting about this is how it highlights how close Sanders and Trump are, and how far from Hilary they are, when it comes to one specific issue, which is free trade, economics, foreigners, the middle class, and so on. Both Sanders and Trump have a sort of "fuck the rest of the world, America needs to be as rich as possible, free trade is evil, we should protect our own industries, you deserve a well-paying job by virtue of being American and those foreigners don't deserve shit, free trade is the devil" going on. I remember the time when I really soured on Sanders was when I read this Vox interview. I think the whole section is worth quoting in full: Now, I mean, I'm not even close to a libertarian, and unregulated free trade can lead to all sorts of horrible results for people in poorer countries, especially indigenous people on land that gets taken from them for commerce or polluted via factories, and so on and so forth, but Ezra Klein is 100% right that people in other parts of the world have it much worse than people in the United States, and one way to help make this better would be to open up our borders to the people who want to come here. So much of Sanders's response made me sad. First is the knee-jerk "anything the Koch bros. say must be wrong!" I mean come the fuck on, I'd like to see even a modicum of intellectual honesty from someone who wants to be the president of the United States, and if your first reaction to a classic socialist position is "the Koch brothers support it so I don't" that's a fucking joke. Second is his defense of his position in terms of how he doesn't "think there's any country in the world that believes in that," as if something can't be a good idea unless everyone else is already doing that. How about being on the moral vanguard for a change? Every idea starts as something that nobody believes in. One of the points of socialism is that it has no borders, which is why historically most "countries" have against it. Socialism envisions the end of the state! Third is how focused on America (and even on Vermont?) he is. This is the place where the similarities with Trump are really clear: both Sanders and Trump seem not to give much of a shit about what it costs the rest of the world, so long as we can make the middle class in America better off. People in parts of the world are getting by on less than a dollar a day (as Klein points out, "poor by US standards is quite well of by, say, Malaysian standards" and Sanders would rather worry about free college for Vermonters. Fourth is how he turns every question into his stump speech about the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent, but whatever. Clinton, meanwhile, at least seems to give a shit about what happens in other countries. Granted, the form this takes is her being willing to send in the army and blow shit up until things get better, which I think is typically the wrong response, but at least her intentions are in the right place, you know? Ditto for free trade - again, I'm no fan of the form it often takes, and I was against TPP as much as anyone else, but at least Clinton doesn't seem to have a knee-jerk "fuck the world if it's going to cost the American middle class anything" attitude that Trump and Sanders do. I'll also note that, yeah Henroid, you're making this thread a really unhappy place. You need to dial a bit back on everything.

Thanks!

If you want good ratings, Criticker is the place to go. It bases its ratings on people who rate movies similar to how you rate movies, which means it's almost always spot on. I rate movies on a 1-100 scale and the rating it guesses for any given movie is almost never more than 5 points away from my actual rating.

If you read what the gay Arab Muslim student has to say, it's actually not very surprising that they're voting for Trump - the sorts of concerns they express are pretty pedestrian concerns shared by a lot of the other Trump voters. The assumption that being gay, or Arab, or Muslim, automatically makes someone into a progressive is actually one of the things that has sent this student into the arms of Trump: like they mention, "the Democrats almost arrogantly expect me to hand my vote to them because of who I am, which insults me." Trump, as far as I know, actually hasn't said anything virulently heterosexist, and although he obviously is saying terrible things about Arabs and Muslims, there are lots of different Arabs and lots of different Muslims, and expecting to them to act as some monolithic voice in unity against Trump is almost as ridiculous as treating them all like enemies in the way Trump does. A gay Arab Muslim student has almost as many reasons to hate Democrats as they do to hate Trump: Trump is of course more extreme, but both of the mainstream political parties are both far more heterosexist, far more anti-Arab, and far more Islamophobic than they have any right to be. I'm not saying that Hillary isn't clearly a much better choice for any reasonable gay Arab Muslim student, but I am saying that it's not ridiculous to me that this student would be subject to the same sorts of biases that the other Trump supporters express, and certainly the idea that it should just be obvious for "these people" (where "these people" is gay people or Arab people or Muslim people or women or black people or whatever) shouldn't support Trump is the kind of reductive thinking that, employed for other reasons to reach other conclusions, makes people think voting for Trump is a good idea. This is another way of putting the point I made earlier: Trump isn't special and America was not a bastion of tolerance and multiculturalism and love before he started running for president. A gay Arab Muslim student has had literally zero candidates effectively representing their interests when it comes to who to vote for for president throughout the entire history of the United States. The idea that one of them would support Trump should send you to Mars only as much as the idea that one of them would ever have supported anyone else for anything other than pragmatic "the least worst is best" reasons.

My own view is that Trump is just bringing to the surface a truth that many people have always known is true: the United States is currently, and has been since its inception, a misogynist white supremacist state that is virulently hostile to all sorts of people for no particular reason, up to and including being perfectly willing to talk about torturing and killing them. I don't think this marks the USA out as special - everyone else is racist, sexist, etc. - but given that some people have been and are willing to cling to some kind of American exceptionalism, it's interesting to see someone tearing the facade off so adroitly. There's no way to downplay Trump's obvious appeal to huge swathes of the country except by saying that people are just virulently racist, at the very least in the passive sense of not giving a shit about anyone who they think is different enough to not matter, at all.

Two issues I still have:

Yeah, I'd be super interested in at least seeing the six pages of notes. I hope my comment didn't come off as too accusatory - I think a nicer way of putting it would be that the way I think about this podcast, it's not like Sarah and Chris are special authorities or arbiters of what's worth talking about, in the sense that if they don't bring something up then it's not part of the discussion. As far as I'm concerned, everyone else in these threads is just as much a part of the conversation, and if you were really looking forward to a discussion of all the Greek myth stuff, you don't have to wait for Sarah and Chris to do it for you: you can do it yourself, with us (and Sarah and Chris, even!) here in the thread! So, in other words, don't be sad that other people aren't talking about what you want to talk about. Instead, just talk about what you want to talk about! I think the best way to get people talking about something is to start talking about it yourself, rather than hoping they'll talk about it, especially if you're enthusiastic about the topic and have six pages of notes to touch the conversation off.

But maybe they did, for all we know! The book just doesn't focus on those characters.

Are you similarly sad that they didn't go into all the Shakespeare stuff, or are you fine that they skipped over that? Everyone's allowed to care about what they care about, obviously, but if you're writing off the podcast for not focusing on your bugbear while you're fine with them not having focused on someone else's bugbear, that's a little myopic, no?

I feel like I'm just repeating myself, but maybe it will sink in the second time:

This is one of the reasons I like the game so much: it does a great job of putting you in Henry's shoes and making it believable that Henry would be freaking out over some sort of conspiracy, because that's exactly what you do with the evidence you get, even though, as you and Henry eventually find out, there was nothing to freak out about in the first place and it was all in your head, more or less.

One of the reasons I like System Shock more than SS2 is that System Shock didn't have a whole clunky RPG system bolted on top of it. That whole deal added very little to the game for me. I'll be glad to see it gone if SS3 ditches it.

Read this book. In general I enjoyed it a lot, so I'll put my negative thoughts first and thus we'll end on a more positive note. Stuff I didn't enjoy so much: So much for things that didn't grab me. Now on to what I enjoyed: Finally, my copy of the book amusingly had, at the end, "questions and discussino topics" which are "intended to enhance your group's reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go." I will reproduce them here for everyone's edification:

Amusingly I finally decided to read t his book on the 8th, without realizing the episode was out. I finished it yesterday. Haven't listened to the episode yet, so here are my pre-episode thoughts: Looking forward to listening to the episode! I'll probably report back after that.

FWIW, I played for months and months and months without getting very good at all - I rarely made it to the ice level. Eventually I made it to the throne and died instantly. Then I made it to the throne again and killed it. I've made it to the throne a few more times and I think I'm legitimately better without having reached any sort of mastery or whatever.

The best part of that clip is the guy walking past who pauses mid-stride like "whoa a robot playing golf, I'm gonna check this out" then by the end of the clip he's just as pumped as everyone else.

I wouldn't be uninterested...

I CANNOT FIX THE THREAD TITLE (long story) so please imagine that the title is: Nick Breckon and Porpentine: Same Person? Twins? This is "Fuck" Nick Breckon - Idle Thumb, game developer at Telltale Games, PC gaming enthusiast, Machiavellian schemer, former Bethesda employee: This is Porpentine: indie game developer, Twine evangelist, Rock Paper Shotgun columnist, professional weeper, curatrix on Free Indie Games, trash harpy, queer tranarchafeminist: Click me (large image) The resemblance, I submit, is uncanny. Possible Explanations F. Nick is Porpentine Evidence: 1. Both the Breckon and the Porp are game designers who focus largely on narrative. Despite having recently released Armada, a game with graphics where you attack stuff with slime and so on, Porpentine is mostly known for her Twine games. Breckon, meanwhile, has a writing credit on The Walking Dead: 400 Days and is now working on the second season of The Walking Dead. The skillsets and interests of these two game developers clearly lie in narrative games that they spend their time writing.... 2. Nick is a master of disguises - see the following picture: 3. I have never seen them in the same room together. Porpentine has never been on Idle Thumbs, for instance. 4. They look a lot alike! Possible Issues: 1. Nick is a dude and Porpentine is a lady. 2. Porpentine's hair looks like hair, not a wig. So it's unclear how she can have long hair while Nick has short hair if they are the same person. Likelihood: MEDIUM. Further investigation required. Nick and Porpentine are Twins Evidence: 1. They look a lot alike! 2. Both speak of having played video games growing up, but Porpentine often talks of consoles, like the N64, whereas Nick is much more of a PC gamer, with fond memories of TIE Fighter and so forth. They grew up both enjoying games, but they couldn't both play on the PC or on the consoles, so they agreed to split. Porp got the consoles, Breckon the computer. 3. We don't know Porpentine's last name. It could be Breckon. Possible Issues: 1. Nick has never mentioned sisters, and Porpentine has only mentioned a sister. Unless Nick is the sister Porpentine speaks of, and unless Nick never speaks of his sister, we have an issue. Likelihood: MEDIUM. Further investigation required. They Have Nothing to do with Each Other Evidence: 1. This is the null hypothesis, so to speak. Most people have nothing to do with each other. Possible Issues: 1. Have you looked at the pictures? 2. They both like video games. Likelihood: MINIMAL. I would not bet money on it. Thoughts?

A good book to read about culture is Watching the English. It's by an anthropologist and it's an anthropological study of English culture. Lots of people (English people especially) find it very eye-opening to see their culture described "from the outside," so to speak (the anthropologist is English but her descriptions bring to light the ways that English culture is its own thing, like Claire Hosking is talking about). I remember once years ago I stumbled on a website that was like a Cliff Notes version of world cultures for diplomats - it had an entry for most countries on earth with basic things like how to be polite, typical customs at meal times and when meeting people, and other stuff like that. It was fun to browse around but the real revelatory one for me was America - seeing all of my habits and folkways described in blunt language from the perspective of telling an outside the motions they have to go through to fit in was really interesting. I realized that I take a ton of things for granted. That said, I also think that a lot of things are at work that "dilute" America culture, so to speak. In addition to SuperBiasedMan's point about America exporting its culture so much, America is a HUGE FUCKING COUNTRY, which means there's a lot of variation in "American" culture, but at the same time America is an immigrant nation that has had a hodgepodge culture for as long as it has existed, which means that it also has a strong homogenizing tendency that works at cross-purposes with the tendency to split itself apart geographically. I also think that white people, at least in my experience, tend to be fairly happy to identify with the non-American portion of their identity, like itsamoose's friends. People who don't pass as white (Hmong, Indian, etc.), again at least in my experience, tend to be a bit less happy about highlighting the difference, probably because people give them so much shit for not actually being American because they're not white people. Nobody asks white people where they're "really" from in America. Meanwhile black people get shit from both directions - you've got people saying "go back to Africa" and at the same time white supremacy has spent the past few hundred years erasing all traces of African culture that it can, leaving a black American whose family hasn't recently arrived with not a lot to go on, so to speak, apart from being American, which means being a member of a society that has discriminated against you and your culture literally since day one.

Some people are insensitive bigots who enjoy hurting people, and trigger warnings are designed to help people keep from hurting each other. So, if they want to be able to hurt people, they've got to be against trigger warnings. One way to do this is to turn them into a huge joke, which other people are happy to go along with because they're willing to have a knee-jerk reaction against anything progressive, which is just human nature generally. Since #GamerGate and gamer culture generally is one huge knee-jerk reaction against anything progressive, #GamerGate and gamer culture hates trigger warnings.

The world may be poorer for the fact that Dear Esther is a game. But Dear Esther is a game. There is no such thing as a (good) "natural evolution" in language as contrasted with a (bad) "unnatural evolution". Language means whatever we want it to mean. There is no "natural" meaning for a word. We made up all the words. I really don't see any benefit to your approach. I honestly cannot make heads or tails of your Tomb Raider example. It seems to rely on the idea that it would be much easier to talk about things if game meant something other than what game means. But I don't see any difficulty talking about Tomb Raider the way we normally talk and I do not think your way of conceiving of "game" actually clears anything up. I can, however, make heads and tails of people harassing Twine authors for having not made games because they don't want queer people and trans* people and women muscling in on their gamer territory. So I think I know where I stand on this one.

This would be like conducting a poll to see whether the majority of people call a peanut butter sandwich a "sandwich." It would not be a very worthwhile use of time and money. If you check the Steam reviews for Dear Esther, even most of the negative reviews call it a game. It is only a small number of the reviews (mostly negative ones) which deny that it is a game. I'm not sure why you are drawing this distinction. Would you say it's correct to call Dear Esther a video game but incorrect to call it a game? I realize that this is what you think ought to have happened, because you have an odd personal idiosyncratic definition of what "game" means. But just like my desire that we all suddenly call peanut butter "flim flam" is likely to be somewhat unconvincing when it comes to my suggestions about what ought to have happened in the past and what ought to happen in the future, I find your desire that we stop calling Dear Esther a game to be unconvincing in terms of how people ought to have responded to Dear Esther criticism and so on. Notice that the majority of negative Steam reviews have no problem admitting that Dear Esther is a game. It never crosses their mind to deny it. They have other issues with it, legitimate or not, but most criticism of Dear Esther that I've seen focuses on how it's a bad game, or a pretentious game, not on how it isn't a game. So I don't buy your narrative about backlash and proper responses and so on. Even if I did, we'd have to change what words mean, and that is not easy. The ship has sailed. You are wrong that the word "game" has "meaning or precision that it has in all other contexts." Wittgenstein, who wrote before video games existed, demonstrated that "game" does not have any such meaning and precision. I am not trying to swallow anything. I'm just speaking English. I have not made any decisions - they have been made for me by common usage. That is how words work. You may lament the effects of this. I personally do not lament the effects of this. But whatever the effects, you cannot argue that you are right and I am wrong. The best you can do is say that you wish that you were right and that I were wrong. But until wishes come true, Dear Esther is a game. The idea that people like Dan Pinchbeck or Porpentine are "not aware of the preexsiting fields of software art" is ludicrous. The fact that people think the label "game" best fits their software art is not evidence of ignorance, it's evidence of people who aren't delusional about about definitions calling a spade a spade. Perhaps you think Dan Pinchbeck and Porpentine ought to join you on your crusade and thus ought to refuse to call their games games, because they have the power to change the world. I'm not really buying that, but even if you're right, this is a case where they would have to use the word wrong for a while until they use it right, like the people who used "literally" to mean figuratively before they won that fight. Would you say that software art is a genre of video game? If not, I don't think your analogy works, because everyone in your example agrees that a book has been written. If so, then Dear Esther is a game. You should probably read the link to the forum thread that I posted back on the first page of this thread. In there I explain why it's a profoundly misguided endeavor to come up with a sensible definition of "game." This is why the creator of Mountain failed and this is why you will fail any time you try. Language is not a "taboo," language is a way of attaching meaning to strings of sounds or symbols. You might not be happy with how language has shaken itself out, but this doesn't mean that you can declare by fiat that "game" means something other than what it means. You might be unhappy that Dear Esther is a game, but this doesn't mean it isn't a game. It is a game.

There is no argument anyone can ever make to convince people that they are using a word like "game" wrong except by pointing out that other people do not use the word this way. That is because words are made up, and they don't mean anything aside from what we take them to mean. If you find yourself having to fight tooth and nail to call something software poetry rather than game, because everyone else reflexively calls it a game and posts about it on games forums and gives it game of the year awards and writes about it for video game websites and video game magazines and so on, you've already lost. You can talk about why you'd prefer it if everyone agreed with you and stopped calling it a game, but nobody can ever be wrong to call it a game so long as your quest remains quixotic, as it is always going to remain, because the ship has sailed long ago. With the except of a tiny niche of gamers who for various reasons desperately want the word "game" to mean something other than what it means, everyone who sits down in front of Dear Esther and plays (er, sorry, "experiences?") it is going to call it a video game. It's not clear to me what your reason for embarking on this definition quest is - if it's because you want better accuracy, I'm afraid that you're mistaken in thinking that "game" is an inaccurate moniker, because it's only according to your idiosyncratic classification scheme that Dear Esther isn't a game. In fact calling it anything other than a game would be inaccurate given the way normal competent English speakers use the term. Earlier in the thread you said that "every time you use a word to describe a thing, you consciously or unconsciously decide which categories best fit it" by way of explaining why Dear Esther is not a game, according to you. This runs up against the same worry: the category "game" does fit Dear Esther, like a glove in fact, insofar as we are using the term to mean what normal competent English speakers use the word to mean. You might have a preference that things were otherwise, but this is no guide to usage, just like my preference that people call peanut butter "flim flam" suggests that we ought to call peanut butter flim flam. Earlier in the thread you said that to deny something is a game is not to render any sort of value judgment. This is true, although you wouldn't know it from the way most people who deny that Dear Esther is a game go about things. If you spend some time reading Steam reviews you'll find plenty of people who think "not a game" is a criticism of Dear Esther, some of whom list it as their only criticism. Here are some examples: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198050154712/recommended/203810/ http://steamcommunity.com/id/epiplon/recommended/203810/ http://steamcommunity.com/id/atrithau/recommended/203810/ http://steamcommunity.com/id/DynamiteNonsense/recommended/203810/ http://steamcommunity.com/id/sanctorum/recommended/203810/ http://steamcommunity.com/id/datgame/recommended/203810/ http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197969569455/recommended/203810/ http://steamcommunity.com/id/Zupe00/recommended/203810/ Similar things occur with lots of other games that people like to brand as not-games, like Proteus. Perhaps the fact that people are wrong to attach a value judgment to the statement "not a game" renders all of this irrelevant, because you are not joining them in attaching such a value judgment. I think that the things these people say and do gives us good evidence of the sorts of things that happen when we brand games as not-games, especially games by and/or about marginalized groups like queer people, as Dear Esther and many Twine games are, and I think this is highlighted well by the Chastain storify link and the Game Police twitter account and the Errant Signal video, all of which were posted earlier in this thread. I think that even if (contrary to fact) Dear Esther and so on somehow weren't games, it would still be worth calling them games, simply to combat this kind of exclusion, even though branding something a not-game does not necessarily imply a negative value judgment. You ask "why is it so important to you that all forms of (at least minimally) interactive multimedia experiences mediated via a computer are considered 'games', specifically?" I think this is an odd question - since you're the one using words to mean what nobody else takes them to mean (or, I should say, nobody else except the small niche of gamers that agrees with you - there's a lot of overlap with #GamerGate here, actually) it seems like the onus is on you to explain why you're so weird with words. It's important to me to call these things games for two reasons: first, they're games, which any normal competent English speaker can tell you after fifteen seconds of watching you play them; and, second, the forces working to exclude these things from the discussion of gaming are forces I do not like. I suspect that you do not see yourself as an ally of these forces, because you think we can still talk about not-games in the channels that we might have thought were reserved for games (video GAME forums, video GAME websites, GAME of the year discussions) but you have to admit you're in a really weird position to say "look on the one hand they're not games but on the other hand of course you should talk about them when you talk about games." You asked "Are you sad that Microsoft Office isn't considered a game?" I am not sad. I am not sure why I would be sad. You asked "Would you consider an executable which simply plays a recording of someone reading T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland a game?" I probably wouldn't. I'm not sure what hangs on this. You note that "Maxis used to market all of their software as Software Toys specifically because they themselves didn't think they were games." Language changes over time. Maxis no longer markets all their software as software toys, because nowadays we call these things games. You may lament this change. You might want to go back to the bygone era when software toys were called by their rightful name. Perhaps you want to go back in time to before comic books were called comic books so that you can stop people from applying the label to books that are not comic, or to a time before novels were called novels because not all novels are novel. Unfortunately you cannot turn back the clock. Language has moved on. Games are games. Say say that you are "using the English language in a manner which I think gives the things I'm talking about credit for how they are experienced, which doesn't normally require that much worry or concern on the part of people using their native language." I am not sure why "game" does not give Dear Esther credit for how it is experienced. If I thought "game" meant what you think it means, then I would agree. But neither I nor the vast majority of English speakers think this, and the evidence is that I and the vast majority of English speakers would call Dear Esther a game if we were sitting in front of it, or if we were reading about it on a video game website, or learning about its game of the year awards. You say that you're "trying to get labelling right." But the only way to judge whether a label is correct or not is whether your usage of the label corresponds to everyone else's usage of the label. Your label here is clearly incorrect. You have incorrectly judged Dear Esther to be something other than a game, when in fact pretty much everyone calls it a game. If I label peanut butter "flim flam" I have not gotten labelling right. I could go on, but hopefully the point is clear.

I guess maybe all I have left to say is that if Dear Esther is not a game, then we ought not to be talking about it here, because this is the "Recently complete video games" thread in the "Video Gaming" forum. I of course think it's a game, but if you disagree then you really shouldn't be bringing it up in this thread in this subforum.