TychoCelchuuu

I love how at about 1:42:19 the Thumbs more or less dissolve into riffing on each others' hilarious joking about Jake's tooth speaker while everyone else is just sort of sitting there trying to figure out what the heck is going on. edit: and at 1:44:50 Jake is very specific about when certain robotic advancements occurred in the past. He's definitely on top of the Big Dog stuff. edit 2: at ~1:53:00 Jake talking about how you can't look at a watch on your wrist without making people think you want to leave is so goddamn true. As one of the few people left wearing a watch it can sometimes be a real chore to check the time without seeming rude.

What an amazing podcast. Also if it means hearing more Nick, Chris should pull his whole "don't talk for a while" thing every time. Nick is cool! Congrats Nick.

If you like movies, The Treatment is a tremendous podcast. Elvis Mitchell interviews filmmakers and he does a great job of it. He often offers his reading of the film to the filmmaker and asks them about it, and he also knows like, everything about movies, and he's big on intertextuality, so it's fun to see what movies he links together. It's been a long time but I think good episodes include Brad Bird on Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Nicholas Winding Refn on Drive, and Will Gluck on Easy A.

Oh look I've never posted in here. http://steamcommunity.com/id/TychoCelchuuu

It's true that the mechanics of MTG lead to the fact that it "makes sense" to separate out things by subgroups. There are two issues, though. First, just because something makes sense in terms of game mechanics doesn't mean this isn't also sexist. For instance, I'm sure I could design a game where it "makes sense" for all the black people to be criminals (for whatever reason). That doesn't make it okay, though - it just means that the game mechanics have forced me to be racist. "The game mechanics made me do it" isn't even an excuse, it's just an explanation for why your game is sexist or whatever. Second, even if we disagree with my first point and say that it's fine if game mechanics force you to act in a sexist/racist/whatever way, this still isn't a justification because it's simply not true that the decisions made in accordance with game mechanics are neutral. To pick out a certain group as the "other" is never just a rational, statistics based process, because you could always alter the set from which you're selecting people so that the "other" group is the default group. For instance, this game made "female" a special characteristic because "male" isn't particularly special for game designers, but this is only because it's a game about all game designers, rather than a game about all human beings (where "female" is slightly more common than "male") or all female game designers plus a few token males, or whatever. There's no such thing as a neutral setting if you're going to use it not to just depict how things are but to also label things in such a way so as to color your depiction. Less obscurely, if you're going to say "being a female game designer is bizarre" it's only because you've chosen to carve game designers into categories based on gender in the first place, which isn't inherently bad but which certainly comes with issues once you start assigning gender a role in your game or making female the exception or things like this.

Kasdan pulled a Lucas and sort of deteriorated in skill over time, but maybe he'll pull it together this time. He's got Star Wars cred, that's for sure.

How spooky you find the house seems to be very specific to different people. I'm a baby gamer but I didn't find the house scary at all. Gamers in general seem to find the house much spookier on average because they have experienced lots of houses like this where monsters attack you, whereas non-gamers, who have no reason to expect a monster to show up, tend to be less scared.

No, I don't mean an in-game explanation (that's irrelevant), I mean an explanation from the developers that explains whose idea it was to give her a session in a beauty salon in between games and why they thought this was a good thing to do.

They're totally worth playing. howling dogs is my favorite but a lot of them are really great.

That's not a very good explanation because it doesn't explain when or why she got her hair done or what compelled her to put makeup on.

It was revelatory for me in that for the first time I realized games could have writing that isn't basically shit.

Good lord that dot gobbler is amazing.

I take 833% of the recommended daily dose of Vitamin C each day. My dentist told me to do it and said it's good for my gums. I think he was right because whenever it runs out or I go out of town and don't take it along, my gums get more sore.

Finally finished listening to the podcast (sometimes I listen over a long period of time with a gap or two). Really, really great stuff! I'm looking forward to the rest. I've thought some (more than a little, less than a ton) about games for non-gamers. What I would recommend would vary wildly depending on what kind of person I was recommending the game to and what my goals would be in recommending a game. The conversation here seemed to turn as much on "what would do a good mix of getting you set up to be a person who enjoys games and also showing you what's so great about them," which I thought was really interesting, because although I could see those two things as being important to think about, mostly when I think of the question "what game would you give to a newcomer" I mostly ignore those two considerations and think about showing them something they'd like. For instance, a lot of my go-to "first game for someone ever" games are Twine games. Are Twine games good things to show to someone if your goal is, for instance, to get them comfortable with navigating a 3d environment, dealing with time pressure by making use of hand eye coordination, and becoming accustomed to the sorts of narrative strategies games use? No, because Twine games are very different from other games. They don't require any skills that people who use Google don't already have and thus they don't teach anything. They don't work the way other games work, so they're not going to give people their first exposure to common game narrative techniques. For all that, though, the Twine games have some real advantages over other games: namely, people who don't play games can enjoy them, a lot. For someone who's willing to read complex, evocative science fiction out there on the edge of literary technique, howling dogs is a revelatory experience, something that will open their eyes up to how amazing games can be. For someone (justifiably) worried about the narrow focus of video games, which tend to be about the sorts of things nerds find cool and/or violence, Cry$tal Warrior Ke$ha and Calories and Queer Pirate Plane and Arcadia show them that you don't have to like nerdy shit to like video games. Games like You Will Select a Decision and The Message get people straight into the narrative and are compelling and/or funny from the very first moment and up through the very last moment, which is a kind of sustained engagement that most games will never get with new players because they struggle so much with the mechanics. So that's why I'd pick games like these as a first game - the idea is to have them play an icebreaker to open their eyes to the idea of games as an area of entertainment and art that they haven't been live to so far. Maybe the articles in The Atlantic or whatever will be enough to do that, so we're just talking about different questions and if I had someone as eager to game as the people Jake, Sean, and Steve were imagining I'd also give them Portal, but I tend to think the stigma that games (deservedly) have needs smashing in a way that has basically no chance of frustrating, confusing, or boring a potential new game player.

I saw my face fairly often in Portal 2. Maybe I dick around with portals more than most people, because I guess you don't have to see yourself if you just straightforwardly solve puzzles, but whenever you make infinite loops that you just run around in or whatever, you get to see yourself from all kinds of angles. In addition to getting a haircut and makeup in Portal 2 in what was obviously an overtly sexual/attractive manner, Chell also stripped down from the frumpy test suit into a form fitting tank top.

In the interest of specificity, the animations are not low res at all - they're at the same resolution as the rest of the game, which is perfectly respectable. What's turning you off is how 'jerky' they are: the animations are composed of very few frames compared to, say, a cartoon, or even compared lots of stop motion you might be familiar with, like Wallace & Grommit. This is much easier for the animator but it results in a style that might not be everyone's cup of tea.

the fuck would anyone do their own homework for, that's like, so 1990s.

"Hit the high notes" isn't a euphemism, is it? It's just a figure of speech. Unless I don't understand quite how you're using it.

Definitely - Gone Home is like, the opposite of pretentious. It's young adult fiction, basically.

But you can compare Gone Home to games, too. Compared to its main predecessor System Shock, there's less stuff to find, less freedom in moving through the environment, fewer incidental details and more storytelling done through straight up notes that just tell instead of show, and no organic in-game way to explain the voice logs. It's basically baby's first immersive sim if you critique the game angle rather than the story angle.

That Bogost review more or less sums up my feelings about Gone Home (well, that review and this post I made on another forum). Anyone who read that review might also be interested in this blog post on the review (not mine).

a podcast

its a podcast

I'm glad we can base some stuff in space!

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT YESSSSSSSSSS