TychoCelchuuu

I'm down for some shiptastic action! Unfortunately I'm busy that time Friday but hopefully some other time I'll be able to join everyone.

Yes but you still get all the money they earn.

It's a thing where you get all the money that they earn and pay them less of it.

There is a distinction in philosophy between "human," which describes a member of the species homo sapiens, and "person," which typically describes an individual with their own agency who therefore deserves respect and moral treatment. But most people assume that any human deserves respect as an individual (and thus any human is a person) and ONLY humans deserve respect as individuals (and thus any non-homo sapiens creature is not a person). So racist people would say that people of a certain race were "subhuman" in order to suggest that they don't deserve the same treatment that humans deserve, namely, treatment as a person. So when you call a neanderthal "not actually human," you are correct about the biology, but you may be incorrect about whether they are persons. In fact I think it's pretty clear that neanderthals are persons (notice that this also provides a counterexample to the idea that only humans are persons). Since Luftmensch has in mind the racist people who called others "subhuman" not based on biology but based on a desire to call them "not persons," he was worried that you were equating personhood and membership in the human species, which is an erroneous assumption.

I hate that that sentence is so quotable because it always makes me want to go and read Neuromancer again. Neuromancer is like Deus Ex - every time someone mentions it, I have to fight the urge not to go back through it.

A story about love, loss, regret, and isolation. It wasn't exactly subtle about its themes.

Ah yes, since the '90s no gaming magazines have had any cover girls.

One of my colleagues wanted to use an example from The Matrix in class but only ~6 of the (college aged) students had seen it.

I don't think he's supposed to look like Pierce Brosnan (he's not even the same race, let alone preternaturally handsome in the same was as Brosnan) so presumably his costume is "me as the guy on the GoldenEye cartridge" and since "me" includes "glasses" I don't see what's wrong with wearing them.

I played this through a month or so ago for the first time and adored it. Absolutely beautiful, with great writing for the voiceover and pretty good sound design too. I'll have to play it through again at some point to see some of the randomization stuff but aside from that I don't have much to say, just that it was a great experience.

The computer isn't doing everything, obviously, but it's crafting the specific narrative the player experiences, and when those narratives involve certain things, computers are really bad at it. Now, WHY are they bad at it? Well, I guess because we're bad at programming them to do it. So you can always back the analysis up a step. But the point is that when you read a narrative, if a computer spit it out right then and there, it's going to have some weaknesses when it comes to, say, dialog, compared to a narrative a human spit out the old fashioned way.

That doesn't really reply to youmeyou effectively, I think. The point was that even though you can have a perfect justification for having half-naked hyper-idealized sexually objectified women in your game, it's still your choice to come up with a game universe filled with rationalizations for showing gamers the kind of women that all other games show them. When creating fiction, the possibilities are wide open, but somehow game developers just happen to create fictional worlds with great excuses for women to be dressed like strippers.

32 shades of grey, eh. That's pretty surprising. More than a decade later and we've only made it to 50.

Blade Runner is basically dystopian noir. All it shares with cyberpunk is an aesthetic and commentary on what it means to be human. Cyberpunk can do entirely without the latter and still be cyberpunk. I think juv3nal is 100% right that cyberpunk requires something to be punk against. Blade Runner is the cyber in cyberpunk but it's not really about the punk. "*punk" has lost all meaning now that we have words like steampunk, but I think genuine cyberpunk (rather than stuff that adopts the cyberpunk aesthetic, or, broadly, "postcyberpunk," like Ghost in the Shell) needs punk as much as it needs cyber.

The joy in the frustration comes from a ton of things, but a large part of it, I think, is that it takes place in a safe, structured space, where nothing bad is going to happen to you. Maybe S&M is similar. But there's something fundamental about humans that makes us want to be scared or in danger or challenged or hurt in contexts where this can't actually happen, maybe for the same reason kittens (and children and so on) play-fight with each other. Also, on an unrelated note: I appreciate the effort not to spoil Miasmata, but going back to a discussion that happened a few episodes ago, Greenlight is such shit, because it spoiled the fuck out of Miasmata for me. Part of that was the developers' fault, but really, the incentive on Greenlight is to show your goodies, so they showed them, including the thing you didn't want to spoil. Lame.

You're right (Akrasian, not Mington) but at the same time, just because it's not "procedural generation" as you've defined it that's the problem, maybe you would agree that "procedural generation" as it refers to computer programs trying to craft a narrative is indeed the problem when it comes to, for i n stance, human interactions, right? Sure, it's not the fact that it's procedural that trips us up, and really it's a fact about the nature of the narrative more than anything, but computers are bad at something humans are good at and a good way to describe this distinction when it comes to video games is procedural generation vs. a crafted narrative, because we're talking about what the game is doing. Just because you can say "oh, but the humans are also procedurally generating the story" doesn't mean that procedural generation isn't the issue, because it is: games can't do it (for certain kinds of narratives). It's like saying that paper Pong is no different from normal Pong because they're doing the same thing (moving the ball and paddles and so on), just in one case the human does it manually by turning the pages and in the other case the computer does it. In one sense you're right, but the point of paper Pong is that humans are very bad at moving paddles and balls at a speed that is fast and accurate enough to make a fun game, whereas computers are really good at that, so when we play Pong we want to play it on a computer. And computers are bad at crafting human narratives with dialog and interactions and stuff, so when we do that we want the human to have done it.

Anachronox is kind of a JRPG cyberpunk game, yes?

Doom, Quake, Red Orchestra, Zeno Clash, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Far Cry 2, Teleglitch, TF2 before items took it over, Starsiege Tribes, and also I have a weird enjoyment for mediocre third person shooters, which I enjoy much more than good third person shooters, such that Spec Ops: The Line and the original Mass Effect are two of my favorite games when it comes to the combat.

The original Deus Ex did a fine job, although the human nature stuff wasn't as blatant as "what happens when we get robot arms" because by the time the game takes place, robot arms are starting to become obsolete. You're 100% right about the other stuff, though - for every interesting philosophical insight in Ghost in the Shell, there's a naked cyborg lady with her tits out to here.

Man, what a thing to be good with.

This is also a good time to jump into the "Quake vs. Unreal" debate and point out that compared to Quake, Unreal has always felt clunky

Should have been literally anything else in the entire universe.

This has become the second "plug your shit" thread but it's about actual shit.

I found System Shock to be a far superior game to System Shock 2, and you can ever mod it to add in a more proper mouselook if you want. I would suggest playing System Shock first, and then if you must have more, you'll probably appreciate System Shock 2 for the complexity it adds, or realize that weapon degradation is just a pain in the ass which you end up modding out.