TychoCelchuuu

Cardboard Children has just released another game, Limits & Demonstrations, set in the same universe/with the same awesome art/etc. This one's free so check it out. Also, here is an article on it.

They could tell us how they really feel about Far Cry 2.

Telling anecdotes is a really trendy thing to do.

The difference between an anecdote and a trend is that the first happens once and the latter happens a lot. So I'm glad we got that cleared up but I'm not sure we needed any of your posts to do that, because I've never met anyone who thinks an anecdote is a trend or vice versa.

There are at least 3 or 4 conceptions of "illiterate" floating around here, which is my fault because I did not go through any trouble to make it clear what I was talking about when I introduced games illiteracy. The first fundamental distinction is between "understanding how to interact with the game" and "understanding what you get out of a game when you interact with it." The former idea concerns the ability to, for instance, play a first person game and look at the things you want to look at without having to consciously think about moving the mouse, or the ability to play a platformer and time your jumps and so on so as to overcome the obstacles. The former idea relies on things like hand-eye coordination, muscle memory, and spacial reasoning, and it's the sort of thing people get good at just by playing games. People who are "illiterate" with respect to games in the first sense are just bad at making the game work, and thus they often can't make things happen that they want to make happen. This is probably the closest to the traditional definition of illiteracy when it comes to text: you literally cannot read something in a book, and thus you just can't make it happen. Lots of people are games illiterate in this first sense because they don't play a lot of games. The second sense ("understanding what you get out of a game when you interact with it") can also be broken down into two parts. The first part is "understanding what a game says by way of understanding how a game says it" and the second part is "understanding how to interpret any text/work of art" (I use "text" as a generic name for things we interpret but that's just a personal quirk - games aren't texts in the literal sense). The first sense concerns what some people see as the only real way to "read" a game, which is to read a game as specifically a game, interactive systems and all, and look at what the game does insofar as it's a game to deliver a message. People are literate or illiterate with respect to this first sense to the extent that they can interpret interaction not just in the base, mechanical sense (you push a button to do X in the game) but in a meaningful sense (having the player push the button makes them feel X). People who are illiterate in the very first sense of the term (see the previous paragraph) are likely to be illiterate in this second sense of the term. Because they lack the skills to pull off most game interactions, they're going to have trouble interpreting the meaning of a lot of game interactions. Because games involve the player in producing the message, you can't be literate with respect to games in this sense without having a lot of empathy or, more obviously, having the ability to make the games work yourself (by playing them). Then there's the second sense of illiterate in this second distinction (so, the third sense of illiteracy) which is not being able to read texts in general and thus not being so great at reading games. People who aren't used to talking about how movies say things with their palette or their camera shots or their lighting or their pacing, or who aren't used to talking about how novels say things with their plotting or their diction or whatever, are presumably not going to be so great at talking about how games say things with their level design and user interface and so on (they also won't be so great at interpreting a game's plot in the normal, "X said Y and this means Z" sense either). This third kind of illiteracy will make it tough for anyone to analyze a game no matter how literate they are in the first two senses, because you can be an amazing gamer in the first two senses but largely blind to what games actually say. Everyone is an amazing movie watcher (you just have to stare at the screen) and most people can read, but this doesn't mean everyone is good at interpreting (or just "reading") film or literature. This is likely more complicated than I'm making it out to be and also much simpler than my explanation makes it sound. If that makes sense. But the short version is: the majority of the populace is bad at playing games because they don't play games. Because they are bad at playing games, they are bad at reading games, because reading a game typically requires having some knowledge of what it is to play the game. Finally, they are bad at reading games because they are also bad at reading film and literature, and gamers too are bad at these things so really it doesn't matter that everyone is bad at the first two things. Which is not to say that getting better at the first two wouldn't help anyone. Film critics would probably get a shitton out of playing Thirty Flights of Loving if they were able to absorb the narrative for what it is rather than wander around in confusion because they can't control the character, they don't understand that they can "Use" things in a video game, etc. Good film critics are likely games illiterate in the first two senses but not in the third. This is one reason I like Twine games so much. Almost nobody can be Twine illiterate because the skills required are pretty much just "click on words and read stuff." I think Twine is, for the near future at least, the way to go if anyone wants to make the case for "games can say things" to a non-gamer, because a game they can play that isn't coated in a thick layer of impenetrable "learn how to use a gamepad and navigate a complex three dimensional world" is going to let them bring their interpretive skills to bear immediately. Although I do remember Jake or Sean tweeting about a conversation they had with their mom about The Walking Dead, and the tweet was something like "I'm glad I make games that my mom can talk to me about," the point being that The Walking Dead doesn't really force you to learn much game shit either. The third person perspective helps massively, I imagine, as does the relative lack of time pressure in anything other than the QTE parts, which are pretty easy to learn.

I don't understand what you're saying. The glass ceiling and rape are caused by sexism, whereas men harassing women on the street isn't? And the reason you think this is that you get harassed on a bike, so clearly the same thing is causing bike harassment and street harassment, and since you are a dude, it can't be sexism causing bike harassment? That just all sounds wrong to me. The stuff causing people to harass you on a bike is a perception that you're fucking up their driving by biking on the road where cars belong or something. The stuff causing people to harass women is a climate that says that this sort of thing is normal and acceptable and expected from men because women probably like it when you complement them so why not? Since you say something about intent in your post, I guess you mean that the intent behind street harassment is not "sexism" but rather something else. But that's irrelevant to whether it is caused by sexism. People are unconsciously sexist, and in fact that causes not just street harassment of women but also the glass ceiling and rape. Nobody actually sits down and says to themselves "gee I think I won't promote any women to CEO because I'm a male chauvinist" and nobody says "gee I think I'll go rape some poor woman because I'm super sexist." Heck, nobody sits around and says "gee, I hate women, I'll go harass some on the street." Straight up "sexism" hasn't been a real motive people would cite as a justification for their behavior for a while now.

Maybe first person adventure/exploration games with better graphics would work for you, like Amnesia or Miasmata or Dear Esther or The Void.

Anita self-massaging her crazy robot foot (direct link to image for the super lazy).

You can buy Outcast on GOG.com if you want!

I give up. What's wrong?

The main Wikipedia page for the series has two citations for the "first episode is a pilot" thing. The first citation leads here, where the creator calls the first episode a pilot and the second citation is to this book, which seems to confirm that HBO did have them shoot a pilot first. So yes, it looks like maybe The Wire went through the whole "make a pilot then make the series" thing.

Well, if the "game-y" things aren't somehow part of the world, then yes, the more the game makes you forget about those things the more immersive it is. But if it's a football game, forgetting about the score is not more immersive. The point for me is that immersion is about feeling like I am in the narrative as a participant, specifically as the participant the game has cast me as, just like being immersed in a movie consists in feeling like I'm actually watching the events taking place on the screen rather than watching a projection on a screen in a movie theater.

The way I think about immersion is similar to youmeyou's way of thinking about it: I think immersion is the degree to which you feel less like you are sitting at a computer playing a video game and more like you are doing whatever it is that you or your character is ostensibly doing in a video game. So, World of Warcraft is not at all immersive because I don't think I ever felt like I was doing anything other than playing an MMO, whereas the original Syndicate got to be super immersive at times, because I truly felt like a person working for a corporation floating in a blimp above a dystopian future city pumping cybernetic agents full of drugs to get them to do what I was ordering them to do. It has nothing to do with the HUD, although in games that don't have an in-universe explanation for the HUD, removing it can help immersion because it removes one more reminder that you are playing a game.

I didn't mean to make much of a point about the immediacy of it - I like to think of most of the playthroughs not as specifically crafted examples of a one-time consumption of some piece of media that subverts the normal way of experiencing it, but rather as sample playthroughs that more or less match the average experience of someone playing the game. Not everyone records their first (and potentially only) time through Thirty Flights of Loving, but I suspect that those who do record it and who post it on YouTube are not entirely outliers when it comes to how they play. I suspect they're pretty average. So when someone rushes through the game and misses everything, I wasn't taking that to mean "wow, these people are seeing it as a one-time reaction generation engine for YouTube." I was taking as a "when people play through games, they miss things, whether or not they are recording it for the benefit of the world at large." And I think I'm right, given the times I've seen people play things in a more natural setting, just on their own for fun. They play in largely the same way that most of these YouTubers play, except they don't vocalize their experience (except sometimes to me since I happen to be standing there). So my point was really a larger one about games literacy and media literacy generally: how much do people really get out of the games they play? And specifically, how good are they at reading games? I teach at a university and right now I'm teaching the first of a 5 class English sequence where the students read great works of literature from throughout history: the Bible, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Inferno, etc. A lot of what I do is teaching people to read, not in the "you are functionally illiterate" sense but in the "let's learn how to get something out of these books other than what you could get from the plot summary on Wikipedia" sense. Being really literate in a medium means being able to explain what a movie made you feel and why and how it made you feel it. It means being able to explain what lessons you got from a novel and why you think you got those lessons. And it means being able to say something about Thirty Flights of Loving more than "well, that was crazy," and even more so it means being able to say something about Gravity Bone other than "the game forgot to give me the third tool." Although I do think you're right that maybe a culture of immediacy doesn't help this sort of thing - nobody primed to find something to tweet about is going to do the work it takes to conduct an in-depth analysis of the movie they just saw - I think a larger part of it is just how people approach entertainment media and what they want to get out of it. If people want to switch their brains off, the last thing they want to do is read what they consume. If people want to turn their brains on, I think they'll be more inclined to read things into what they experience and thus get more out of it. Which is sometimes why I think games are especially prone to being glossed over: people play games to turn their brains off, a lot of the time, and the rare games that specifically give you something of substance to chew on* (TFoL, Spec Ops, Dear Esther, Analogue: A Hate Story, etc.) often get passed over by people who aren't looking to chew on things. But I think even worse is that people just are never taught how to chew on games (or to a lesser degree film). Nobody takes a high school class where their teacher introduces them to an amazing game and shows them that there is so much more going on than just clicking on stuff, but if you're lucky, a teacher in high school at least tried to get you to appreciate Shakespeare (at the very least they acted like you ought to appreciate him). So I think people are just bad at reading games and that gamers aren't particularly literate. Whether this is because gamers tend to play games to turn their brains off, or because people just don't have practice reading games and don't think about it as a possibility, or because our culture of immediacy makes them more concerned about having something to post to YouTube or tweet than they are about finding meaning, or something else, or some combination, I'm not sure, but I know I lean in certain directions. I've thought about writing some sort of article or making some sort of video about how to read games, and using Gravity Bone as an example because that game more than most rewards reading it as a game specifically in so many instances, but, well, obviously I haven't gotten around to it yet. * This is a bad way of putting the point. Every game gives you something to chew on, even mindless, stupid games. Stupid movies and books give you things to think about too. I've seen tons of interesting stuff written about Transformers and Twilight. But of course games like TFoL and Spec Ops invite more active intellectual participation from the person playing than something like Quake 3 invites.

Of the two, I think Gravity Bone is much more geared towards gamers, because much of what makes that game great is how it subverts expectations about things like how many items your inventory will hold or when a level is going to end or whatever. Thirty Flights of Loving still has stuff that gamers are more likely to appreciate (being able to grab the bullets and the guns even though that does nothing) but its narrative and its impact is much more divorced from typical gaming tropes. Which is not to say either are great games for non-gamers... except... kind of... argh. This sort of line of reasoning brings me to a larger point that I don't have the wherewithal to write about now, simply because I really ought to be doing other things, but... Well, this is tangentially related to the idea of gamers being educated about games, in terms of being able to appreciate them. On some days I think there's a ton of truth to that notion. Sit a person who doesn't play games down in front of basically any game and marvel at how much they miss. People who haven't played FPS games before tend to spend 40% of the time looking at their feet, and they never look up, or in the right direction, or anything like that. They miss 80% of the game. (I once watched a livestream where someone had his roommate, who does not play games, play through Amnesia: The Dark Descent. At one point she missed some elaborate scripted thing and he said "some little Swedish man that made this game is devastated because he spent ages on that and you didn't notice." At another point he said, truthfully, "A lot of the scariness of this game is ruined by the fact that you just don't fucking pay any attention.") And since both Gravity Bone and especially Thirty Flights of Loving move at such a fast pace, are so visually dense, and are so purposefully disorienting, your average "oh god I'm lost" non-gamer is probably going to be just... at sea. So that's what I think half the time. The other half of the time... One of my hobbies is watching playthroughs of Thirty Flights of Loving on YouTube. People who want to be the next TotalBiscuit load the game up and say "hello everybody I'm xXxDragonSlayerxXx and I just bought this game from Steam so here is a let's play" and it's fascinating because you get to see someone's first encounter with the game and hear their stream of consciousness (which is what you often get in Let's Play videos). And... these people, whose hobby it is to not just play video games but to play them obsessively enough to record their thoughts each time they play and post it all online for strangers... they miss stuff. Like, lots of stuff. I've seen people go through the hideout without "using" Anita or Borges, meaning they miss the introductions to those characters, and so on. People run through without looking at things or paying attention to things. I'm not talking "you missed the Three Days of the Condor reference behind the bar," I'm talking "you didn't notice that Borges was on the wanted posters that slowly covered every available surface" or "you didn't read any of the plaques or anything in the museum at the end." Pretty much anything it's possible to miss, people miss in droves. Gamers miss in droves. When I first played the game, I lost track of Anita and Borges on the roof and wandered around for 4 minutes before I noticed them sitting at the table. And of course it doesn't help that both games are fairly obscure and don't go through the effort to convert their story to easily digestible bits of pablum that you could understand if they were fed through Google Translate and turned into Russian then German then back into English and told to you while you were half asleep, like many games tend to do. So what's my point? I don't really know, except that as hostile as I suspect GB and TFoL are for non-gamers, I'm not so sure they (or anything, really) are accessible to gamers either. People are just bad at "reading" (playing?) games. And movies and books, I think. People often aren't careful, and I think a large part of what separates people who like "boring" or "art" movies/books/games from other people is whether they are careful when they consume these things, or whether they want to turn off their brain when they are entertained (and thus enjoy Transformers). People who are careful like to play, watch, and read things that they can get something out of if they put the work in. And I think GB and TFoL are amazing games for someone who wants to put the work in. But for other people I'm not sure how well they work. They're certainly colorful and equipped with awesome soundtracks, so that can't hurt, but anyone engaged just enough to want it to make sense but not enough to see the brilliance is probably going to be left cold, perhaps like Luftmensch's sister.

I didn't mean Gravity Bone, sorry - I assumed that anyone with TFoL had also played GB since they come packaged together. I love them both but for different reasons - I think I like TFoL more but I go back and forth. Really they're kind of hard to compare. They are just the latest two entries in the Citizen Abel series, though, which is why I was asking about the others. (I played Gravity Bone back when it came out and loved it so much that I almost backed the Idle Thumbs Kickstarter even though at that point I had never listened to the podcast at all. It is in part the good taste shown by getting TFoL as a backer reward that drew me to eventually become an Idle Thumbs reader.)

Has anyone played the other Citizen Abel games? I almost bought Quake II from Steam to play them but Brendon Chung said stuff about how they were pretty amateur compared to his later work so I figured I'd give them a pass. Can anyone tell me if they're worth checking out?

Your definition is flawed because clear counterexamples exist, like Thirty Flights of Loving, which is a game with no challenge. Or, to put it another way: "I can't think of a single example of a comic that doesn't feature sequential panels of images, and some sort of humorous situation." I'd be correct about the old meaning of "comic" but incorrect about what it has come to mean. You are correct about the old meaning of "game" but incorrect about what it has come to mean. edit: Note also that under your definition, the card game "War" isn't actually a card game because there is no challenge (you just flip cards according to the predetermined rules - it's no more challenging than pressing forward). But War is a card game.

Sometimes when it's "me against the world" it's because "me" is wrong. The comics point is from the Proteus post. Words mean things that aren't the same as the meanings they used to have. "Game" is a good example - it now encompasses things like Thirty Flights of Loving. "Comics" is another good one - it encompasses things that aren't at all comic. So I was asking why you think "game" has to mean this special meaning that you alone seem to attach to it, rather than what everyone else understands it to mean. And you reply that this is turning into a bullying match. The reason I'm asking you to justify your opinion is because you come into threads like this and say "well it isn't a game" as if that's supposed to mean something other than "I made up a meaning for the word 'game' which TFoL doesn't fit."

So, why aren't you convinced by Lord Proteus' argument? Do you go around saying that comics aren't comics if they aren't funny? Do you have anything substantive to add aside from your claim that games require something that some games (like TFoL) don't have? You ask for an example of a game without goals and challenges, but you're posting in a thread of one of the best examples.* Thirty Flights of Loving is obviously a game in the sense that most people talk about games (that is, it's sold in the games section of Steam and when you tell someone to play it you tell them "hey check out this game") and even if it's not a game in the sense of your pedantic meaning of "game," you haven't explained why anyone should care, any more than you've explained why we should care about whether a comic book is actually comical or not. *TFoL does of course have goals - get to the end. Eat an orange. Discover why Anita is pointing a gun at you or where she got the robot limbs. Save Borges. Escape the airport. But whatever.

Nah, it wasn't directed at you, more at the general mass of people that doesn't want to watch anything older than Star Wars or anything with fewer colors than Alice in Wonderland. I'd be interested in hearing about what turns you off about films made before 19XX although maybe that's getting a little far afield. An Idle Film Club would be pretty sweet because it's easier to watch a movie than read a whole book on my Busy Modern Schedule™.

And then you walk 10 feet and find Megaton. Fallout 3 had really atmospheric Metro stations (unless/until you got bored of them) and sometimes the wasteland felt really neat but in general I think it's far inferior to New Vegas in terms of making me feel like I'm there. New Vegas goes to pretty stupendous lengths to make the areas feel like actual areas that people live in - the sheer number of rooms and buildings in that game that serve no real purpose other than to be places to make the existence of the world plausible is impressive. Compare that to Fallout 3, where Megaton is this weird self-contained tiny little city with food that comes from... who knows where, and I liked the Mojave as a place to lose myself much more than the DC wasteland.

Proteus himself has commented upon the issue. Good old Proteus.

Red Orchestra, Dishonored with the HUD turned off, Natural Selection, Dark Forces and especially Dark Forces II, Zeno Clash to a certain degree, Freespace and Freespace 2, X-WING and TIE Fighter, the original Syndicate, the Chronicles of Riddick games, and sometimes when I'm wandering around, Fallout: New Vegas.

ThunderPeel2001 you should apply to be one of the police officers of the Game Police. You'd be really great at it.