TychoCelchuuu

Jason Rohrer is really trying to corner the market on dead wife simulation games.

Crap artists might not know they're crap either - the difference is that nobody will buy a game with crappy art in the screenshots but people will buy millions of copies of games with plots that could most charitably be described as "worthless" and "bad."

Just make sure you don't go to dickssportingwood.com. (I have not tried that url)

Tales from the New Republic. And for future reference, when Googling "the sultry purr of smooth jizz," enclose the phrase in quotes. If you don't... well, porn.

Excellent, thank you.

Ugh. I hadn't read the interviews, but I went and read them and now it's pretty clear to me that Reyturner's analysis is the furthest thing from Jason Rohrer's mind - it looks like he unironically believes most of the stuff Reyturner is saying the game could be criticizing as absurd, with the possible exception of the hypermasculinity stuff, which is what started this conversation in the first place. So ironically he can defend everything except the lack of women avatars, and the way he defends it is by saying "yep, sounds about right to me." (Interview part one and part 2)

That's sort of different from Rohrer's own defense of the male-only protagonists, which is that it's a very personal game for him about his experience.

Excellent podcast. Hilarious, mostly. Can anyone find that picture of Chris' ridiculous suspension bridge? I cannot locate it.

ok http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1216936499/back-to-bed-0?ref=users http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iridiumstudios/there-came-an-echo-0?ref=users http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1298800608/rogue-system?ref=users http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/levelzerogames/net-gain-corporate-espionage?ref=users http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/teampixelpi/pulse-reveal-the-world-through-sound?ref=users http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera?ref=users

The game's on GOG.com now so you don't even have to watch it, you can play it!

I don't really like TV but Veronica Mars is a fantastic show. It's like Brick + Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if you know that movie and that other show. So I'm thrilled to see the movie succeed like this (I even pitched in money!). Kristenn Bell is a pretty great actress who mostly gets stuck in shitty roles. Plus:

Solution: use Opera. (The little lightswitch in the upper left that switches posting to plain text mode seems to make things work better for me wherever I am - if you can give up the convenience, I'd say try that.)

How can the music be better than Sim City 4? That game had an amazing soundtrack. In any case, I may have spoken too soon about the game being regressive. It appears that utopian commune cities with zero industrial or commercial zones work just fine. Nobody needs a job! Nobody needs to buy anything! Down with the capitalist system! The explanation: And apparently this is one of the most efficient road layouts you can build: The reason is that all the agents (people, fire trucks, power, etc) all just follow the road to the nearest thing they want (all the fire trucks go to the closest fire until it's put out, all the people go to the nearest house or job instead of a house or job they own, etc.) so if your city is laid out like an actual city, everyone will end up stuck in traffic all the time for stupid reasons. Whereas if everything is one continuous loop, the traffic flows freely and the worst case scenario is that you have to make it most of the way around the loop to where you are going.

This blog post addresses some of the issues we've been discussing (or more accurately some of the issues Chris and I have been discussing via massive missives while everyone else writes normal-sized posts about normal Sim City things) and I think it's interesting for that reason. His focus is on movies simplifying history, rather than games simplifying reality, but the gist of it is that he's fine with movies simplifying history in the sense that they can still be "recognizable, but not complete. Their over simplification doesn't make them untrue," because they "should be judged and defended on their merit: as a first look, a glimpse, a reminder" rather than as an actual representation of actual things that actually happen. This is how I think Sim City ought to be judged and why I think it's bad for it to leave options off the table. I don't want a 1:1 recreation of actual cities. What I want is a simplification of cities, a first look, a glimpse, a reminder of what actual cities are, but one that I can play with, poke, prod. When I change something in my Sim City, it doesn't have to react with 100% veracity, because who could ever make a game like that? Even Receiver cuts corners. I just want my Sim City to provide glimpses of what would happen to an actual city, reminders of what would happen to an actual city. I want a vague facsimile, not a mirror. And if Sim City leaves options off the table, I want it to justify leaving those options off the table, and if it leaves options off the table that suggest that the reality it is simulating is something other than the reality I believe exists, I'm doubly in need of a justification. Sim City absent the justification seems like a movie that falsifies history not by fudging the details or simplifying things but by actively saying that things were as they were not, and to the extent that this fudging of history has deleterious results (like, for instance, making people think that cities must be designed around cars), I have an issue with that.

No, I mean, the fact that it fails in its own goals is a valid line of criticism, like you've pointed out, but moreover it invalidates the point that focusing on these goals excuses it for having failed to model the stuff I'm saying it ought to model, because focusing on these goals hasn't bought it whatever simplicity and ease of simulation you've argued is necessary if they're going to pull off something like modeling each individual sim or whatever. Basically the idea is that if the excuse for having car cities rather than all sorts of cities is that it's a necessary simplification to get the simulation to work right, the fact that the simulation doesn't at all work right is a sign that no amount of simplification will make it work, and thus there isn't an excuse for cutting stuff from the possibility space for the sake of workability.

(Incidentally, all of this stuff also invalidates your point, Chris, about how they went in a bold new direction and had to cut certain features out to make their agent simulation work, and then later they can add this special stuff back in. At this point it looks like they're doing a worse job simulating individual sims that Sim City 4 did - at least in that game people had houses they lived in an jobs they commuted to in a sensible manner, rather in this nightmarish collectivist bizzaro-world Maxis has created with this game.)

Yay they are fixed!

The issue is not at all about the accuracy of the simulation, it's about what is included in the simulation, however accurate it happens to be. I'm not annoyed that Maxis chose to simulate things with X degree of fidelity - what I am annoyed is that they chose to simulate Y things with X degree of fidelity, where "Y" is "a possibility space that rules out progressively designed cities." Civilization is abstract but it allows you to achieve different sorts of victories - scientific, diplomatic, or militaristic. If Civilization billed itself as Civilization but you couldn't beat the game peacefully, I'm sure people would shit all over it for wrongly implying that progress is only possible through beating the shit out of other cultures. That's not true, and in fact it's a dangerous and regressive idea, but luckily Civilization's systems don't suggest this and never have. Civilization's systems suggest that many things can lead to triumph, including uniting everyone in cooperation or discovering more about the world. War is of course an option, but it's not the only option, and to make it work you have to kill lots of people. All I can ask of Civilization is that it allows civilizations that thrive in real life to thrive in the game, and it does no more and no less. I ask the same of Sim City. City designs that thrive in real life ought to be possible in the simulation, or, if they are ruled out, the simulation needs to be honest about why they are ruled out. Sim City needs to bill itself as "Fuck, We're Not Smart Enough to Make Anything but 1950's Suburbs Work in Our Simulation: The Game" instead of "The City Simulator" because right now Sim City is saying that the right (and in fact the only) way to make a city is to design a car company's wet dream. Just like if Civilization only let you win through warfare, it should call itself something like "Warcraft" or "Command and Conquer." My basic point is that games that purport to represent reality, no matter how much they abstract reality, have a duty to model that reality in a way that doesn't suggest anything pernicious. If they want to suggest something pernicious, that needs to be part of their explicit message, something they convince you of on its merits, not something dictated by fiat in that the simulation pretends that if you disagree, you are not just wrong, you are believing something impossible. Sim City suggests something quite pernicious - it suggests that cities need to be build around cars (and that cities can't have taxes above X% without riots and so on). These things are pernicious because I would say that they are patently untrue (counterexamples exist as we speak!) and because belief in their truth leads people to vote against funding for public transit and so on, depriving cities like Seattle of mass transit that they could really use. And Sim City suggests these things by fiat. If you try to build a walkable city it just doesn't fucking work, and the reason it doesn't work is that the game thinks that car cities are the only cities. If that were its explicit message, then fine, it's just a dumb game, but it's not explicit about it. Nothing that I can see about how the game bills itself suggests that anyone would ever think it's only about building car cities until they pick it up and try to do otherwise. So, if Sim City is really in the position you say it is, namely, as picking "Sim Suburb" as the starting point, it needs to be honest about it. Don't sell Sim City: sell Sim Suburb, or Sim Car City, or Sim City: Most American Cities version, or something. Don't just pretend like cities have to be the way they are in the game, which is the message that a title like "Sim City" sends.

I haven't played the new one, but SC4 is my favorite. SC2k was stupendous, SC3k was alright but nothing special, and SC4 was a return to form. Never tried Societies - it was considered a failure when it came out but I've heard some people say it was an under-appreciated gem.

Well, that's the thing. It's just a static painting. Looks great in screenshots but not super convincing in-game. Kind of a bold aesthetic decision but, I think, ultimately unsatisfying.

Uh whoa not so fast there with the CliffyB love. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Cliffy "the second letter" B weighs in.

Yes, they do have to cut the fidelity in some places, and I'm not annoyed with games that reduce the complexity of a simulation and cut corners in order to make a workable game out of an approximation of reality rather than out of reality itself. I don't think this is the case for Sim City, though. I don't think "the ability to make cities in a way other than the way 1950's America thought cities to be" is something they've done to cut corners and reduce work - I haven't played the game, but as far as I can tell, there are massively complex things going on with all sorts of interlocking systems, from city halls to casinos to recycling centers to interconnected regions that connect cities and so on and so forth. Yes, there's a reduction compared to what was in Sim City 4, but I don't see why the reduction had to be done in a way that leaves the player the ability to build the most intricate, interconnected road systems the series has ever seen (seriously - the effort they put into making stuff like curved roads work must have been massive, and the stupendous accessibility of these curved roads was one of the first things you guys talked about on the podcast) and into making the roads in general work in complex ways (see the video posted this page). So why put all that effort into a game that models car-centric transportation solutions for cities? Why not put the effort into a more reasonable vision of what cities were, are, and could be, and maybe only have 4 kinds of streets instead of 6 or whatever to cut down on the complexity of the car simulation? Let's assume I'm wrong, though, and that public transportation and other sensible options were cut because they were too much work, not at the expense of adding tools designed primarily to make sure you can recreate suburbs. I do have a problem when these reductions are done in non-transparent ways that suggest that they mirror reality itself, when this of course isn't the case - cities can be walkable and based around public transportation and have higher taxes and so on and so forth. Sim City doesn't model this possibility, but it also doesn't strike me as a game that is honest about this fact. That's the work I think the Receiver analogy is doing - I have no problem with Receiver leaving all sorts of guns out of the game, but it's a central conceit of Receiver that for all the guns that are in the game, you can use them like actual guns, and it's clear that if you can't do something with a gun in Receiver it's because the gun isn't in Receiver. There's no assumption built into the game's systems that the only things you can do with guns are the things you can do with Receiver's guns. Whereas there does seem to be an assumption built into Sim City's systems that the only things you can do with transportation in a city is what you can do with Sim City's roads. The fundamental determiner of zone density or productiveness or something seems to be road bandwidth, from what little I've heard - the fundamental assumption underpinning how cities work in this game is that cars need to get where cars need to get, and if you can't facilitate that, your city is fucked. That's not how cities work, though! Cars only need to get places built to be car destinations. If you want to build a city centered around public transportation, where not many people drive, that's totally possible. But Sim City rules that out from the get-go without ever telling anyone. I don't think the Sim City box in the store says "build your dream city, as long as you dream about 1950's America!" From what I can tell, Sim City bills itself as a city simulator, not as a regressive, stuck in the past city simulator. I've never played any of the Anno games so I shouldn't really be talking, but I think the issue is sort of different because nobody today is colonizing islands or whatever, whereas people are doing urban planning, and having lived in Seattle for many years and having time and again seen people argue with all their heart against public transit because they don't really see a future for Seattle as a city where you can get around without driving, I find myself very frustrated to see this game reify what I take to be pretty damaging, regressive attitudes in the way the game models the real world. Sim City seems designed from the ground up to model cities as one specific kind of city, and that's why I think it's fundamentally misguided or dishonest. It bills itself as Sim City but it's Sim Suburb City or Sim Fucked Up American Car City or something. I do have to say that I might be coming around to your position to the extent that Sim City does bill itself as Sim Regressive City or whatever - you said that you understood completely well that Sim City wanted to model a specific kind of city, namely the American "get a car or get bent" city that so many of us are stuck with, for better or for worse. So if you're right about that, then I'm largely fine with Sim City, although I'm also disappointed that they chose to make a game that lets you build only the shitty cities. It's like making a farming game where the only way to run your farm is to have a slave plantation. It's like, sure, if you want to build that game, then go ahead, but it seems weird and provincial to just model the worst kind of farm in your farm simulator. The stuff that got me thinking about this (the molleindustria tweet, which was retweeted by Harvey Smith, and the articles it led to) certainly seem to head in the other direction - people were expecting legit Sim City and got Sim 50's Suburb instead. This article talks about the author's disappointment at seeing the improvements in the franchise from Sim City up through Sim City 4 rolled back. Others don't seem to realize that they've gotten Sim 50's Suburb yet, like that Gamasutra article I linked where the guy was trying to model traffic patterns from his British town. I think my point can be summed up by a comment made on this article by Reverend Joe Zarro, whoever he may be: And then it turns out you don't even have an option to do anything other than build little Phoenixes.

I've been a vegan for a while and a vegetarian for much longer and although I haven't noticed many health differences (probably because I didn't eat much meat even beforehand), I have noticed that food is a lot cheaper. (Plus all the ethical/environmental stuff.) So yeah, try out a month of being vegan and you might find it amenable.

I'm not sure it's an "outright lie" for a single one of her examples to involve less than complete self-sufficiency on the part of the dude. Surely you don't want to bring up the Meryl thing as an example of a portrayal of a strong female character who comes to Snake's aid - that entire scene is about how much more amazing Solid Snake is than Meryl, to the point where he doesn't give a shit that she's pointing a gun straight at him because he knows that she's too much of a sissy to shoot him. And surely you don't want to claim that there's no difference between games where women are prizes taken away to prisons where they do nothing except await the heroic arrival of the male protagonist and games where the male protagonist gets locked up and immediately starts trying to figure out how to solve the situation because even in prison he is large and in charge.