TychoCelchuuu

http://gawker.com/giant-3d-printers-used-to-construct-10-houses-in-one-da-1568375507

New blog post (more pictures at the link):

By "tabletop miniature" I guess you mean "Playstation 2 era 3d models" because I've never seen miniatures that look like that.

http://games.usvsth3m.com/2048/spelunky-edition/

He wrote Much Ado About Nothing though, right?

Not out loud though.

I say Congrats Nick a lot more than I think I otherwise would have.

I like chocolate a lot, and licorice, and peanut brittle, and probably lots of other stuff too, but I never buy or eat any of it because I try to live a fairly ascetic life, and spending money on inessentials like candy feels way too decadent to me. If it were free I'd probably eat a chocolate bar every day, though.

One of the many things I love the most about Idle Thumbs is that the hosts handle their own ignorance far, far better than any other gaming podcast I've ever listened to. Typically the Thumbs are (like most people) knowledgeable about some things and ignorant about others, and also slightly up in the air about what they know or what they don't. The two main differences are that they're usually never ignorant of stuff I know (for what I presume are various and complicated reasons), which means it's never frustrating for me to listen, and also when they are ignorant (either of stuff I know or stuff I don't know) they're always clear about their lack of knowledge. Rather than just straight up saying wrong stuff, they're always talking about how they are unsure or can't remember and so on. I don't find that frustrating at all - in fact, what I find more frustrating are conversations where people are either just straight up wrong or where they refuse to talk about anything they could ever be wrong about.

Something in this episode made me laugh really hard but I forgot what. Good job though.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-04-17-the-true-story-of-bioshock

I like the product description on the new shirt.

The Mao and Che shirts are kind of gross when the people wearing them don't know what they mean, so yeah, I agree. Half-Life 2's use of Soviet aesthetics was presumably to drive home the oppression and hellishness of a world controlled by the Combine, which I think is different than Luftrausers, which is using the aesthetic because it looks bitchin'. The whole "Germans = evil" thing is definitely worrying and thus the Helgast are maybe not the most conscientious design you could come up with, but at the very least I'd prefer "Nazi Germany = automatically evil" over "let's scrub the Swastikas and not even talk about morality," which is what Luftrausers does. Nazi Zombies are weird but I'm not sure they're doing anything gross with the aesthetic. Those are not attractive zombies. I've never seen Dead Snow. Star Wars was doing the opposite of Luftrausers - the aesthetic in Star Wars is used because it signals evil, whereas in Luftrausers it's entirely divorced from the evil. Indiana Jones didn't divorce the Nazis from a historical context in order to use their bitchin' aesthetic for the movie. It made them the bad guys. Everyone seems to be seizing on a tiny part of what I said ('Luftrausers divorces the aesthetic from its context') but my overall point is just that this is the reason Luftrausers is getting shit, not that any divorcing of the aesthetic from its context is bad. There obviously are ways of divorcing worrying aesthetics from their context that are perfectly fine, but Luftrausers isn't that. Luftrausers just grabs one of the things that makes Nazism seductive and used it because it looks cool. Indian Jones didn't stick Nazis in there because they had the nicest uniforms.

Most World War II games don't lift the aesthetic without also lifting the history. The reason Luftrausers is getting shit is because it took one part of World War II (the aesthetic of the Third Reich) and used it because it's appealing and interesting looking. In doing so it lost the context that explains to us why we should be wary of it. When Call of Duty 2 includes a Tiger tank, it's not because they checked all the world's tanks and picked the most badass one, then carefully scrubbed all the identifying marks off of it so as to leave only the war machine. CoD 2 puts a Tiger tank in there because Tigers were in World War II. And we all know how World War II went, and why when we see a Tiger tank we should be thinking more than just "wow, badass." If Luftrausers had just been a World War II dogfighting game it wouldn't have gotten shit, because the objectionable thing isn't making World War II dogfighting games, it's in lifting the aesthetic and divorcing it from its historical context in which it means something and moving it to a new context where all it apparently means is "check out how badass this looks."

I'm not sure it's very uncharitable. We can get people to literally torture innocent people just by labeling one group guards and the other group prisoners. If you think human beings are magical rational creatures that don't let silly things like labels and aesthetics influence their actions then you're living in a fantasy land. There are a lot of neo-Nazis out there and I'm pretty sure none of them had actual, legitimate, good reasons for becoming neo-Nazis. The seductive aesthetic of the movement isn't some kind of accident. Neo-Nazis don't dress up in flannel jackets and sweat pants.

I feel like if you're making a robot you just shouldn't put a fucking red LED in it. Don't give it the ability to turn evil. This is one of my many qualms with the Will Smith vehicle, I, Robot. When all those robots turned evil their chest light started glowing red. Why would you give them a red chest light? That's like keeping vials of cyanide in one of your cupboards. You'll never need cyanide for an innocent reason! (That was related to something in this episode, I swear.) I had no interest in Burial at Sea besides being excited about seeing how gorgeous Rapture looks, but now I'm slightly more interested because of Jake's disappointment with how the corners have been rounded off Rapture or whatever. I feel like too few people pay attention to and talk about aesthetic choices like that in games and I want to see it for myself. Also, nobody has posted the Craig Mullins painting that was mentioned by Jake in that discussion, right? That needs posting:

Well, usually they do a better job explaining their reasons for why they think a thing. If you go back and read my original post, and the ones following it, you'll notice I'm basically missing what the criticism is supposed to be. The idea seems to be that they think there's something Kentucky Route Zero is holding back and not saying, but I can't for the life of me imagine what that would be. And on the other hand they suggest that if you don't want to just out and out say it, then your game should just dial way back and go super abstract. But I can't imagine what KR0 would look like if it did that. I mean I literally don't know how the game would play. So I don't understand the criticism.

I guess I just don't see what Kentucky Route Zero is teasing at that William Faulkner isn't. Like, what is it that people think that game could be holding back? I think the reason I simplified the thought to "just fucking say it" rather than "just fucking say it or reduce it down to tone entirely" is that I have no clue how you'd reduce Kentucky Route Zero down to tone. What the fuck would that even look like? You can reduce Journey down to tone because you can sum up Journey in the single word in its title. Kentucky Route Zero is too nuanced and evocative to be reduced down to just tone and I don't see how it would benefit from being made more explicit because there's nothing you can make more explicit. I think you can't make Kentucky Route Zero more or less complicated without altering it. And it doesn't need altering.

Excellent.

So I think this is going on right now.

I think Blambo meant "can I throw shirts at the Idle Thumbs hosts."

See, to me, it's all just part and parcel of magical realism, and if something pulls it off 99% of the time, I see no reason to think it isn't pulling it off the other 1% of the time. I'm not sure I was ever tempted to read something as overly clever, but even if I was, the game definitely put those doubts to rest. This blog post sums it up very well, but it has spoilers for act II, so read it only after you finish that. In fact, that blog post (excellent as it is) sums it up even better than it knows, because, well:

I've only played Sword & Sworcery for ten minutes, so I can't really speak in depth about it, but it felt completely different than KR0 feels - to me, the two games share about as much in common as any other two point and click adventure games (say, The Shivah and Full Throttle). KR0 didn't feel distanced at all to me, nor did it feel affected. KR0's first act opens on a laconic main character, so I guess that might contribute to a feeling of distance, but eventually you meet other people (and control another person) and those others don't feel distanced to me at all. As for affectation, I never really know what that word means until someone gives me a specific example. It's the sort of thing people say when they want to say "pretentious" but they realize that saying pretentious will make them look like an asshole because that word's just used to dismiss something that tries something that could be interesting but (in their mind) fails. I can totally imagine how someone might see KR0's tone as affected but that's only because I can think of a thousand ways for someone to find any great work of art that actually speaks to people to be affected. The earnestness I don't feel at all. KR0 strikes me as sublimely muted and reserved (which is very different from distanced!). It tells you exactly as much as it wants to tell you and shows you exactly as much as it wants to show you at precisely the pace it wants these things to happen. Sometimes it holds back, sometimes it surprises, sometimes it steadily builds, and other times it satisfies. I definitely didn't feel any sense of overeagerness or a lack of fit between how earnest it was and how it tried to achieve distance or disaffection. To me it's only as earnest as it needs to be when it wants to be. But this is all really abstract. Talking about a game absent specific instances never really means much. What about KR0 struck you as distanced, as affected, and as earnest?

I haven't played Monument Valley so I can't speak to that, but like I said before, it seems to me that if I played a game that fucked this up, I would say something like what you've said in this post, which is that if you do it, don't be bad at doing it. The stuff you said about Shadow of the Colossus, though, made it sound as if you think a pared down, obscure narrative typically only works if matched up with more detailed, evocative graphics, or something, because you can get away with not saying anything if you've got very expressive characters. Basically my issue with the podcast was that it sounded like you were saying stuff like "stop beating around the bush and straight up tell me your story." If what you actually meant was "be as obscure as you want, but just do a good job with it," then that makes sense to me, but it's also pretty obvious (it applies also to non-obscure stories) and it's hard to square with all the discussion of the art and so on. Well, some people like some stuff and some people don't - I can say that I liked The Entertainment as much as any other play I've seen in a while (although I liked it as a game, not as a play, and I think they're two very different things and The Entertainment would work as a play as well as Waiting for Godot would work as a video game). You might try Limits & Demonstrations instead, which is mostly/largely divorced from a lot of the real life context that The Entertainment and KR0 evoke because it's more focused on art than those other two games are.

Offense Feeling offended is like feeling anything else. There's a degree to which you can cultivate a personality such that you can manage to avoid feeling certain feelings, and a degree to which these things are out of your control. Some people feel angry when they are stuck in a traffic jam, some people are calm and collected in the same situation, and both kinds of people are sometimes like this because of conscious choices and other times like this because that's just how they were raised and how society influenced them as they grew up and so on. It's impossible to never be offended by anything solely as a result of choices you have made unless you are a Buddhist monk who has reached enlightenment or a Stoic sage or something like this. Mostly, being immune to offense is a result of having certain privileges in life and not being exposed to the sorts of systemic disadvantages and constant microaggression that, for better or for worse, shape people into being defensive when they encounter setbacks like perceived racism, sexism, etc. That you don't feel this defensiveness is more often a sign that nobody is attacking you and that society wouldn't countenance hurting you than it is a a sign that your psyche is particularly resilient. This is not to say that all offense taken is a sign that an injustice is being perpetrated - perhaps your perception is simply off. But it's not the case that taking offense at something is never warranted. If someone calls me a faggot or a kike or whatever else, I typically don't take offense, simply because I'm a pretty mellow and resilient dude, but if I did, it wouldn't be my fault for having a weak will. But that's not really an interesting conversation to have in this thread. I'm hear to talk about my difficulties understanding the Thumbs' comments on Kentucky Route 0. Kentucky Route Zero and the Thumbs It sounded to me like the conversation was something like "if you have a thing to say, come out and fucking say it. Your art is already so stylized and restrained that pairing this with a story that also holds back is just too much. Shadow of the Colossus can hold back because it has a realistic looking boy and a realistic looking horse. LIMBO can hold back because there's not much there - it can tell you everything without just being a text dump. But Kentucky Route Zero and Sword and Sworcery" (and some other games I'm forgetting?) "are too coy. Say your piece, video games." That just seems sooooooooo weird to me and not like what I would've expected out of the mouths of anyone on the cast. I feel like I must have misinterpreted what is being said. To me, Kentucky Route Zero is a fucking masterpiece, and as has been pointed out in this thread a few times, it fucking nails a sort of feeling, a feeling that the developers KNEW they wanted to nail and which it nails precisely BECAUSE it doesn't just come out and fucking say it. Great art is so often about what is held back - subtlety in a novel or a film or something can make a big difference, in a good way. Obviously there's a range, there - you can be super obscure, or you can just out and out say everything, and striking the balance in the right place is tremendously hard and if you fuck it up one way or another the results are bad. Maybe it's just that, for the Thumbs (or just for Sean and Jake, it seemed?) KR0 fucks it up, in a way it doesn't for others in this thread, because S&J aren't as familiar with the sort of feeling and aesthetic being invoked? That's the suggestion I've seen a few times earlier in the thread, and that sort of makes sense to me, but if that's the case then I feel like I have to disagree quite a bit with the sentiment expressed in the podcast. The sentiment there seems to be "KR0, just tell me your thing, stop holding back," but it's the holding back (among all the other brilliant stuff the game does) that makes it work for people, so it's the fault of S&J for not realizing they're missing some of the context just like someone who didn't know what the fuck the Cold War was wouldn't really get much out of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. To me a good litmus test would maybe be Limits & Demonstrations, the standalone KR0 accompaniment that hasn't been mentioned in this thread (the other one, which has been mentioned, is The Entertainment, and that is one of my favorite pieces of media in the entire world, I think - it 'blew me away,' so to speak). Limits & Demonstrations is less about what KR0 is about (at least not directly) and more about art, museums, and creation. So maybe if the Thumbs played L&D and said "holy shit, this is amazing" they could realize why holding back is important, even at the cost of losing some people who think you're being obscure for the sake of obscurity. But everything I've said here just sounds so harsh towards the Thumbs (at least in my ears). Am I missing something? Is there a way of making their criticism more sensible? The way I would make the criticism is much simpler. I'd say "if you do it right, it works. If you don't, it's too obscure. And KR0 does it right, although of course someone can always find it too obscure." But the way the Thumbs made the criticism, it sounded more like "if you have a story, fucking tell it, don't beat around the bush. Unless you're Shadow of the Colossus, which can beat around the bush, and in fact the opening cutscene, which is direct and which fails to beat around the bush, is the worst part of that game's narrative." What does everyone else think?