TychoCelchuuu

Ugh, not a fan of this essay. If I have to hear one more person tell me Gone Home isn't a game I'm going to dye my hair pink and join the army. Anyone who unironically parrots talking points from the Game Police needs to and read some things. I also don't buy the idea that the game is easier to interact with than IF. I find it much easier because I've grown up playing first person games. If I made my mom sit down, she'd be screwed for half an hour because navigating a 3d environment with a mouse and keyboard isn't child's play. It's something you need to learn and it takes a while. At least my mom knows how to type - she can play IF without getting literally lost. And if I have to hear another person bring up how much this game costs I'm going to steal all my family's VCRs, turn all the lights in the house on, and run off. Nobody ever talks about how much books or movies cost, so if we can stop bringing that up for games, that would be wonderful, thank you. So it sounds like you disagree - when he says You think he's off-base: it makes sense that people who consume all sorts of media will be brought to "full-bore weeping" and inspired to pen "breathless panegyrics" because Gone Home is such an amazing experience. To me, though, what he says makes perfect sense. If Gone Home were a one hour special episode of a teen TV show where the main character comes back from spending a year abroad in Europe and discovers her sister is gay and has run off with her girlfriend, or a young adult novel about the same thing, I have no doubt it would be really affecting in the same way the game is affecting, but I'm having trouble imagining it bringing people who just finished watching Treme or reading Maya Angelou breaking down and weeping or evangelizing about the Gone Home show/book to everyone because it's such a revelation in the way it seems to have influenced gamers. Gone Home made me cry, but every goddamn thing makes me cry, from the end of Return of the King to literally every Disney movie to reading any given line in a Shakespeare play. Certainly it didn't inspire breathless panegyrics compared to something like Howling Dogs or Cart Life - this isn't to deny that it's a great game and I recommend the game to everyone every chance I get, but Bogost is talking about the particular timbre of discussion around the game that treats it like some kind of revelatory experience which will forever represent the pinnacle of the medium's narrative capabilities, which makes sense if all you do is play video games but which is less understandable if you've been reading about and watching the struggles of queer and marginalized people for decades in the media you consume. I'm not sure why you think Bogost's comments represent an "insulting dismissal" - he explicitly says it's a good game and that to place it at the same level as teen novels and such is not to denigrate it. Honestly I think the idea that "high" art or whatever is the only good art is something people are bringing to Bogost's essay, not something he himself believes, or to be less charitable to him but to still salvage the point, it's something we don't need to believe to agree with him - there's a time and a place for everything, and Gone Home occupies a certain place that Ralph Ellison doesn't. One's not better than the other, they're just different things with different merits. In other words, this is how I see it: Nobody's arguing that Gone Home is a bad game or that you shouldn't like it or anything. Bogost is just pointing out that our standards for games are pretty different than our standards for other art and there are a significant chunk of people for whom Gone Home isn't exactly going to be the second coming of Queer Video Game Christ or something. It's a great game like John Hughes movies are great movies. Hughes made some of my favorite films but it's clear that he's doing different stuff than Kurosawa or Kubrick or Tarkovsky and I wouldn't praise his movies for doing what those other directors' movies do any more than I would praise those other directors for doing what John Hughes did. It would be a disservice to both groups: to Hughes for missing what makes his movies great and to Kurosawa & Co. for missing what makes their movies great. In other words, don't act like Gone Home is so amazing that this is the end of the line in terms of what games can aspire to when it comes to narratives or writing or anything like that, because you're selling games and their capabilities short. There are things games can be other than what Gone Home is, just like there are things movies can be other than The Breakfast Club. Does this mean other movies are better than The Breakfast Club? That's a subjective value judgment, and you're free to say whatever you want. Even if you disagree and think The Breakfast Club beats Seven Samurai or Full Metal Jacket or Nostalghia any day of the week, I think you still have to admit they're doing different things and that games can do both. Even if you think Gone Home is better than Howling Dogs or Cart Life or the hypothetical games that are even closer to traditional "highbrow" art, I think you still have to admit that Gone Home is different from those games and that if you enjoy both you're enjoying different sorts of things. We don't have to worry about which is better or worse - we just have to realize that games can be more than just what Gone Home is. Steampunk is so hilariously not punk that it's not even funny. The only reason "punk" ended up in there is because the moniker is aping cyberpunk (which is actually punk), but steampunk is basically the opposite of punk. Let's celebrate the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution and dress up as the fancy aristocracy with a bunch of cool steam-powered gadgets! The proletariat? What? Who are they? Oh, you mean the underclasses that live in Under-London, in constant war with the morlocks! Yes, I suppose they do slave away making these gadgets for us... how unfortunate... well, I'm sure the occasional glance up from their coal-choked darkness, the small glimpses of the sky, where they catch sight of our glorious zeppelins, serve to cheer their dismal lives... gives them something to aspire to and so forth... well pardon me I have to go tighten my corset.

Wanting "punk" to be mainstream is kind of a contradiction in terms. If something's mainstream it can't really be punk anymore, can it?

If you think "punk/queer" is a unique aesthetic in video games you aren't playing enough video games, or the right kinds of games, or something. Here is a book you can read or alternatively here is a queer game to play. Or you can read up on a queer game conference.

We already use unmanned devices to deliver some products or services to people: vending machines, ATMs, the automated bar + ticket machines that block entrance and exit from parking garages, automated checkout machines at grocery stores, and so on. If people want to smash a machine and grab some stuff they have plenty of options already.

Where does the yellow box go? Does it get thrown away? Does the drone come back for it later? Maybe you mail it back to Amazon.com via a prepaid label, maybe the drone hangs out and you give it the box, maybe it's a cheap box and you keep it. How do the drones operate in dense urban areas? Presumably just fine? How would they deliver to a tower block? Maybe there would be a designated pickup zone. Will street view expand to highlight overhead cables? We have cars that drive themselves, probably the drone can handle cables. What happens in bad weather? They don't offer drone delivery. How does the drone cope during interactions with pets and wild animals? How do delivery people? How do they defend against air rifles or illegal eighty buck signal jammers? How do delivery people? Is the calm atmosphere and relaxed pace of fulfilment centre workers shown in that video a subtle attempt to manipulate our perception in the face of what we all know about those jobs? Yes. What stops someone netting the drone and breaking it for parts? You're right, Amazon.com shouldn't build something that people can steal, that's the fatal flaw in their plan. Are you aware that people can steal all sorts of things which are nevertheless still used by businesses to earn a profit? Will we all have tiny helipads attached to our homes? Nobody seemed to think it was weird that we all suddenly had satellite dishes attached to our homes. When cars came out suddenly everyone had garages. When the fireplace was invented I bet a lot of people were like "oh, what, so suddenly we're all supposed to build chimneys? Is that how it works? Every house is going to have a little tower coming out with a hole for smoke? Really? You really think that will happen?" And then it happened because it turns out building a small addition to your house isn't really a big deal. Why is buying a tiny spanner for his skateboard such a priority for the man? He's going to use it for some weird occult sex act. He can't get off without it. How will Amazon acquire access to enough property to run the required number of fulfilment centres with drone heliports when the range and speed of multicopters are so catastrophically limited? Dirty politics. Will there be a fulfilment centre in every neighbourhood? No. How will Amazon and their affiliates maintain the required stock levels in so many places to enable thirty minute deliveries? The same way they do it right now. 30 minute shipping won't be on every item in every place. They'll use their magic algorithms to figure out which items to keep in stock at which center and offer 30 minute shipping on those items. How does this differ from a mailman carelessly throwing a package over your fence? You don't have to wait for the mail carrier to do the daily run. Can drones take signatures? Maybe.

Why would it be an expensive shipping method? Sticking something on a drone and sending it off through the sky where there's no traffic is probably cheaper than sticking something on a truck that has to run on gasoline and gets bogged down in traffic.

Symbolism, obvs. The robot is the patriarchy.

They chose LEGO Marvel Heroes because they had a PS4 and a couple games.

Not every love story is a cliche love story where the two teens tentatively get to know each other and feel a spark there and then fall deeply for each other even though their parents disapprove and they get super dramatic about it when they can't be together then at the last minute one of them leaves a teary phone message and they run off together to live happily ever after. This is basically Ian Bogost's point and I wholeheartedly agree with him.

Wizaaard!

Well, it's basically every teenage romance novel ever. In that sense it's sort of cliche.

I have not played it. I heard it wasn't as good as JA2, so at that point why bother?

I bought this game today (midway through today!) and I already have 2.3 hours sunk into this thing. SPELUNKY HAS ITS TENDRILS IN ME. I've discovered it works really well if you play music from the Indiana Jones soundtracks.

This video made me think about a lot of stuff - I didn't want to clutter up this thread so soon after making my first post, so I took my thoughts to another forum, but nobody there seems to have given a shit thus far. So while I wonder whether I should copy and paste some of that stuff here, you could go read my post and see if it sparks any thoughts.

Bought Spelunky today so I can finally play this (I played the free version a bit but not a ton). I'm uh, definitely terrible. I played like 14 rounds or something then had a go at the daily challenge. It went... well... I'll just let you watch:

That comic instantly became amazing when I started reading it in their voices in my head.

I liked all three of those games, the first and the third particularly. Molleindustria is a great developer.

I thought when he started talking about Papers, Please, Jon Snow actually sort of came around a bit. You could argue he was just mollifying Booker because he wanted to finish up to me he genuinely sounded like someone realizing that maybe worthwhile games exist in the world. It was also heartening to see Booker defend women gamers so much - I'm glad there are some people in our community who are willingo fight tooth and nail for the idea that women play games, that women often outnumber men when it comes to the more popular games, and so on.

Tom Chick often says very dumb things.

Hint: it relates to two of the other tags.

I explained that in the first post!

I thought her main point there was that didn't like being compared to other women because people do this thing where they try to think of all women in terms of other women and pit women against each other to find out who the "best" woman is, when really we should be looking at people as individuals instead of saying "oh, a woman doing something? Let me find the nearest similar woman and compare the two!" People are fine with talking about a man's accomplishments without finding another man to always compare him to but with women people are always interested in rankings and in linking women together so that they can pigeonhole what "women" do into a certain category. It's all part of society's constant efforts to make into the "other" anyone who isn't a straight white male. Straight white male is default: if you're a gay person, people will talk about your art in the context of other gay artists, if you're a person of color, people talk about your art in the context of other persons of color, if you're a woman, people will talk about your art in the context of other women, etc. That's what Porpentine was deriding I think. Her point about just being Porpentine, and not like Lady Gaga or whatever, was clearly a serious thing about not trying to fit someone's life and work into some pat little box so you can understand it: take people for what they are. If you think my Nick Breckon/Porpentine assimilation is seriously trying to slot one person's accomplishments into the other's so as to understand them through one reductive frame of reference, I think you're misunderstanding the tone of this thread. Part of me REALLY hopes I'm one of the two theories and part of me REALLY hopes there are actually three theories out there and mine is obviously the best.

No, she and a dude look like each other. Porpentine no more looks like a dude than Nick Breckon looks like a woman! It's like how Conan O'Brien and Swedish President Tarja Halonen look like each other: