TychoCelchuuu

Brazil actually did have a happy ending the studio wanted to tack on but eventually Gilliam won the fight.

I don't think the brain is totally responsible for the freakout. It's the research that's freaking you out. Just because you need a brain to understand the research doesn't mean the brain is causing the freakout that it's experiencing.

I think what you're really getting at is that the Damsel in Distress trope is all over video games and you basically can't have a strong female character without at some point subverting her and making her into a Damsel in Distress. Which I gather is her point.

Or they think historical fiction is super rad but they can't make a legitimate historical fiction game where everyone speaks in Arabic, where the entire map is open from the start, where there are no collectibles and the player dies in one sword hit, and so on, so instead of bullshitting it and saying "hey our game is legit historical" even when no video game could ever do that, they hand-wave all that stuff with "the Animus, lol" and in fact solve a lot of other problems too (why can't I go to every area of the city, how do I have a minimap, and so on).

Well the main thing to suggest it's the case is that nobody in the entire world would ever want to stay continually connected to a server just to get stuff like leaderboards and less-than-real-time connection to other players' cities in your region, because all that stuff could be handled asynchronously, which would save lots of headaches for people with intermittent Internet connections. Like, what is the benefit of requiring 24/7 connectivity aside from EA's silly attempts to stem piracy? What does it add to the game? tabacco wonders whether the server is actually doing processing for your city - that would be pretty interesting, and I've heard as much has been claimed, but I've [ii]also[/i] heard that if you drop a connection it gives you a bit of time to reconnect, seamlessly, while your city is still going, so it's tough to imagine that the server is truly necessary for any of this stuff. Basically it seems like if I were a Sim City dev I'd leave the always-on DRM out of it because it isn't helping my game.

Well, your feeling is erroneous, so it might've been more fruitful to just admit that she actually did have citations and it seems like it's your fault for thinking a tumblr page linked with a description that reads "For more examples of the Damsel in Distress see our Tumblr for this series:" would be anything other than more examples (read: citations) of Damsels in Distress to fill out her "there are hundreds of examples" claim. I think you're reading a little too much emotion into me saying "fuck." This is a far cry from "her scholarship is awful because she has no citations and even though she claims there are hundreds of examples, I have to just take it on faith." I find her videos uninformative, unengaging, and unhappily stuck straddling the line lobotomy42 points out, and in fact I haven't bothered to watch this one because I don't need a 20 minute YouTube video to tell me what I already know, especially if the jokes aren't super funny as has been the case for the rest of the stuff I've seen from her. This doesn't mean I can't point out the parts of your criticism that I disagree with, right? For someone who anally picks at the loose threads of every single argument regardless of how useful it is compared to the overall point, I would've thought that my specific, pointed responses to various parts of your post would've been taken by you in the spirit they were offered, namely, refutations of some of the dubious claims you made, and responded to in the same spirit, namely with an admission that your claims were incorrect or with some kind of defense of the claims, instead of simply saying "oh well I didn't bother to click on the citations and you seem to be kind of angry and basically I think the video is boring so somehow this legitimates all the incorrect claims I've made." I mean, if you want to play the whole "the overall message is what matters, stop splitting hairs" thing, then I'm happy to play that game, but given that much of your post was nothing but splitting hairs about her video, I thought I'd unsplit some of the hairs that ought not to have been split.

Presumably because the devs didn't choose any of this online DRM bullshit - EA required it. That would be my guess at least.

I'd like to see a blind character with a deaf seeing eye dog. Together, they use a shotgun in a theme park to shoot a zombie that moans brains. Also both the blind character and the dog are female and they are the lead characters.

Well, the reason Polygon does dynamic scores is precisely so they can change the score in response to this stuff, right?

There's a link to the tumblr in the video description. It only has 110 examples, which isn't hundreds, so you're right, it's 100% bullshit. edit: whoops I just scrolled down she actually does have hundreds of examples (tumblr only loads more in the archive when you scroll down). Go figure! She's right about something. You didn't cite your claim that she lacks hundreds of examples so I'm thinking your post is approximately as bullshit as her video. Or maybe it's more bullshit. Or less! Tough to tell - you don't have any citations so I can't figure it out (and if your post were a paper I'd give it an F for no citations). edit #2: you say "This same material may as well have been published in text on The Escapist" but she did post it in text form so I don't know what the fuck you're complaining about.

I haven't listened to the podcast yet, and I haven't even played Kentucky Route Zero yet, but "pretentious" as regards KRZ seems like it might be reaching, at least insofar as we're talking about "aiming for higher art/culture" as Jake described it. http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2013/02/on-limits-and-demonstrations-and-games.html'>It seems pretty clear from even the limited exposure I've had to the work of the developers that they certainly know enough about "art" and "culture" to do more than just pretentiously ape it.

If that is your reason for thinking that great artists ship, then Valve does ship - they test everything they make, constantly, from its very first iteration to what it turns into right before they release it. They have outside people coming in constantly to test their games so that they can see how people respond to it and use that to inform their next thing. The only difference is that whereas other video game companies make paying customers test their games, and other video games make us buy shitty games so that we can tell them what's shitty about it and so that they can fix it in the sequel (I'm looking at you, Blood Bowl), Valve just fixes those things in development instead of releasing games with issues. That's ridiculous. Valve made a ton of money from Half-Life and Half-Life 2, because they were excellent games, before Steam was even a thing. And they made a ton of money from the Orange Box and their other excellent games before the community profit sharing was a thing. If you took away Steam and the community items, Valve would still probably be near the top in terms of profitability-per-employee. L4D2 is outselling Borderlands 2 on Steam right now! Yes, it's true that without community items, Team Fortress 2 would not be wildly profitable more than 5 years after it came out. But it's ridiculous to say that the game is "afloat due to Polycount's work" as if this shows that Valve isn't putting anything into it. Between the back-end for selling stuff and profit sharing, the conversion of the entire game from pay to play into free to play, the massive amounts of advertising Valve does to keep TF2 in the public eye, with preorder items and constant updates (like the entire new Mann vs. Machine game mode) and the contests they run for new items and so on... Valve has put more work into that community store and they've done a better job on it than basically any other game company has done on anything. It's not trivial to take a traditional multiplayer game like the TF2 that Valve sold in the Orange Box and turn it into the TF2 that exists right now. If you think it's easy, then you have to ask yourself why every other company hasn't jumped on the bandwagon. Or why any other company hasn't.... And if you feel like artists could just sell their professional quality work somewhere where they own 100%, then you should tell the poor exploited artists. I know one of the guys who won the DotA 2 Polycount contest - he doesn't seem to mind. Nobody forces anyone to make DotA 2 items or TF2 items. People do it for the exposure and because they love the game and because it's an easy way to make money if the community likes your item and because Valve gives amazing art guidelines that tell you exactly what you need to do and how to do it. If you think it's so easy to set up some sort of storefront like Valve has done, so that the artists can get 100% of their profits, go ahead and point to one of those storefronts and I'm sure the artists will all switch to selling their stuff there. In reality the only other big contender (aside from DotA 2...) is the Unity storefront, as far as I know, and that only gives you 70%. "Sure, they're an amazing studio, but they don't deserve to be praised as much as other people praise them" strikes me as an unhelpful sort of criticism, like calling a movie overrated or disliking a song because it's popular rather than on its merits. Surely it makes more sense to talk about the substantive issues, as you've done in the rest of your post, rather than to criticize Valve because you think other people like it too much. Really? Do you think Valve doesn't intend to make games? A company full of game developers who can do whatever they want even if it won't add to the bottom line, and you think all of them want to work on storefronts? I think the storefront stuff is extremely interesting and compelling. Valve tried to do the whole "free user created content is the future" thing after seeing the success of Half-Life mods, but it didn't work for Half-Life 2 and it generally hasn't worked with the latest generations of games. Mods are still amazing, but there are fewer and fewer of them and they are less popular. Why? Because as graphics fidelity increases and the market gets oversaturated with other games, you have to have massive amounts of skill to make anything people will pay attention to, and even then you aren't guaranteed that they'll see you on Desura or whatever the fuck backwater part of the Internet your mod has to hang out. Even mods on Steam often don't have many players. How many are playing HL2 CTF right now? So Valve went back to the drawing board. They could no longer just provide a moddable engine and let their customers create content. Unreal has tried to solve this with UDK profit sharing - if you make an Unreal game, you can sell it, albeit at highway robbery royalty rates. That has been sort of neat but we haven't seen a ton of those, again perhaps because the barrier to entry is huge - your UDK game has to be beautiful. Valve lowered the barrier to entry with the content store - your content still has to be beautiful, but you don't have to make a whole mod, you can just make a few models, and you get paid for them so the effort it takes to make a perfect model is rewarded with some income. So now Valve has managed to again cultivate the amazing community of creators we see at Polycount, a community that was in real danger of dying off/becoming less relevant as the modding scene dried up. Now Polycount basically lives on Valve's games. You're saying that's trivial and that Valve doesn't make video games? I'm saying that Valve has created the future, again, with nobody to show it the way. And, honestly, I think most people at Valve aren't working on these storefronts. I think they're just making games at the infamous pace Valve makes games. Neither you nor I can know, but if you honestly believe that "they don't have to do anything other than sit in the middle and take their cut" and that they really just sit around instead of making stuff, then I think that far from being the reasonable person for criticizing those who like Valve too much, you're just flinging baseless accusations because you have some sort of axe to grind. "Valve could've done better" is true, I guess, but who cares? Everyone can do better. For some, it would take more money and time - for Valve, it would take more market pressure. There's no perfect balance, unless you want to just assume Valve has struck the wrong balance, and I see no reason to think that. Portal 2 was super impressive. Well, you can work with anyone, so perhaps they ostracize sexist and racist people. And because your pay depends on what everyone else thinks you should earn, that's another way to deal with it. But really, we don't know. I think it's pretty ridiculous to think that only hierarchical solutions can confront endemic issues like sexism and racism, though. That's a dangerous kind of thinking: companies (and society?) need someone on top, in charge, to make all the right decisions, and we should all just trust the higher ups because they will solve all our problems. The way I see it, you're just as likely to have some racist or sexist jerk higher up the hierarchy as you are to have one in your anarchical ur-collective. The best way to solve this stuff is to have an independent HR department that handles these sorts of issues, probably. I don't know if Valve contracts out for that sort of thing. Neither do you, it seems. I don't know if I deify Valve, but if I do, it's because all the games they make are good. That's pretty crazy. I can preorder a Valve game and know I'm getting a good game. How many companies can you say that about?

Well, if Double Fine had infinite money I'm sure they would look like a very different studio. They might look a lot like Valve... If you don't think Valve's games are brilliant, that's fine, but you're in a fairly small minority there. They're not the greatest games ever made, but they're pretty much flawless when it comes to doing what they set out to do. DotA 2's menu, alone, is better designed and implemented and is more revolutionary and interesting than a lot of games I've played.

Upon looking at the Kickstarter slightly closer, their "what are your stretch goals" thing says "we'll wait to talk about Stretch Goals until after we have reached our target funding" (I guess they weren't expecting more than a million dollars in a day ) and also "planned Stretch Goals include adding more writing talent (including some names you may find familiar)" and given that they got Avellone for their last game and that familiar names might also mean other PS:T contributors, I'm feeling sad I didn't jump on a $20 preorder slot when I could've. Oh well. I'll probably end up backing it. That will be my... fourth Kickstarter (well, the fourth successful one - I backed some failures to make them feel better about themselves). These Kickstarters are starting to add up! Also shit I just realized this is my fifth if you count Star Citizen, which I spend All of the Money™ on.

I think Shadows of the Empire is outside the spoiler statute of limitations by now, so I'm totally OK with that.

Yeah I mean I pledged for Wasteland 2 when Chris Avellone came on board. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to pledge for another Torment game unless they get another Avellone. Or the same Avellone, really. I don't care. Any Avellone will do. I also figured that even if Wasteland 2's story sucks, it might have fun tactical combat.. With Torment I don't even know if that would happen. The original Planescape is about as much fun to play as "taking out the trash" is a fun game to play, which is to say, it really isn't. I want a good story and as far as I can tell they only have one of the original writers on board and who knows if any of his stuff was the good stuff in PS:T. At least they've got Mark Morgan doing the music.

Oh man, that's a really great list of games discussed. No spoilers for Kentucky Route Zero (or Thomas Was Alone) I hope - I haven't made it to either of those yet and I'm really looking forward to them. Also I hope there are no spoilers for Risk: Legacy or SimCity. Someone spoiled the original Risk for me once and now that I know grabbing Australia is the best, that whole game is ruined.

And now it's at 45%.

Holy shit. That's sort of like, the last straw in terms of me not wanting to buy this. EA is going to tell me what I can name my own city? Fuck that noise.

"Timeline 03:00 – An argument about what constitutes gameplay" Maybe I'll hold off on the podcast for now.

edit: wrong thread

All of the preorder tiers are going to be unlocked.

I think Valve is just one giant continual Amnesia Fortnight.

It sounds like you're suggesting it's a bad thing that Valve doesn't push their employees to ridiculous and frankly unethical limits just to get a video game out on the market a few months earlier... crunch is stupid and terrible for employees. Reading up on the game industry just makes me thankful that I don't work for game companies where crunching is the norm. It's horrible and exploitative.