TychoCelchuuu

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Posts posted by TychoCelchuuu

  1. Posted

    So it sounds like you're taking answer #1 - all those things need to also use different words. Do you think that there's a point at which advocating for this sort of thing might have deleterious effects if it's not 100% effective? That is, if you aren't able to change how the entire world talks, there might be negative effects to refusing to call Dear Esther a game that might be avoided if you did call Dear Esther a game? And also, do you think there are any negative effects attached to my position (roughly the "call everything games" position)? What are those effects?

     

    My own view is that my position has no negative effects, whereas your position forces you to be on the side of the unsavory characters you thought I was accusing you of being. Those people ought not to get our help in the culture war and I'm reluctant to give them any help if I can avoid it. It's easily avoidable, too, because as I noted, I don't think my position has any downsides.

  2. Posted

    1 hour ago, aoanla said:

    tldr; my thesis is precisely that there's no good words for what Dear Esther is, and so we should make some, not be lazy and decide it's a video game just because it's a 3d environment.

    My thesis is that "video game" works about as well as "novel" works - video games might not be "games," whatever you think that word means, just like novels aren't novel, but that's okay, we can use the word anyways. The costs to giving up "video game" for things like Dear Esther strike me as much too dear: should it be disqualified from Game of the Year contests? Should someone who worked on it not be able to call themselves a video game developer if that's their only relevant experience? Are talks about Dear Esther going to be barred from the Game Developer's Conference? Should sites that cover video games not bother covering Dear Esther? If your parents tell you not to play more than an hour of video games each day, can you play as much Dear Esther as you want? If someone is awarding grant money to develop video games, should projects like Dear Esther be barred from receiving the money? 

     

    Now, I know your answer to all of these things is "no," plus either "all those things need to also use different words" or "we can just live with the ambiguity." The former sounds way too word-policey to me - that ship has sailed, sorry. It's too late to get IGN to change its name to I?N or to change GOTY to ?OTY. The latter strikes me as a reason for calling Dear Esther a video game in the first place. If we can be loosey goosey enough to let Dear Esther enter game of the year competitions, why not be loosey goosey enough to call it a game? What's the harm? What terrible things are going to happen and why didn't they happen when we kept calling novels novels even when they were no longer novel?

  3. Posted

    Sometimes people use "where is the game" as a shorthand for "what am I supposed to be doing" or "when is this going to get more exciting" or something like that. A couple hours later, if they're talking to another person about what they were doing two hours ago, do you think they'd say "I was playing a game but I couldn't see what the point was" or "I played a very boring game where nothing happened" or do you think they'd say "I don't really have the words to describe to you what I was doing, it was some sort of interactive art simulator that I played interacted with via mouse and keyboard or something"? I have a lot of trouble picturing someone, when pressed to describe Dear Esther, saying anything other than "video game" - that seems to be the only designation that normal people have available to them! But if your dataset includes lots of people experienced with 3d art and data visualization software, maybe that has something to do with it: they're more or less the only segments of the population for whom there might be a distinction between a 3d environment you interact with that's meant to be a game and another sort of 3d environment.

  4. Posted

    Sorry, I misread your post. Your experiences strike me as somewhat idiosyncratic, but I guess to sort out who has the numbers on their side we'd need to do some sort of systematic study. Proteus is one of the games (er, sorry, maybe not a game...?) that I use to introduce non-gamers to gaming, along with other perennial not-games like Crystal Warrior Ke$ha (no fail state), and people seem fine with calling them games, and every parent I've ever heard talk about their kids playing Minecraft refers to it as a game, but maybe I'm the one with the idiosyncratic experiences.

  5. Posted

    I tend not to watch movies in theaters, and I also try to watch older films before newer films, so I've seen almost zero 2016 movies. Here are my reviews of every 2016 movie I've seen ranked from best to worst:

     

    Hail, Caesar! - Lightweight and with lots of loose threads that get tied up in the narrative but not in any satisfactory matter, but still fucking hilarious, filled with great characters and set pieces. George Clooney is in his element as a befuddled dopey movie star and the scene with the three priests and the rabbi had me in stitches. It's one of my favorite Coen Bros. movies despite being less hefty than a lot of their movies, simply because it's sooooo much fun.

     

    Zootopia - Honestly I think it runs out of gas and falls off in the last part, and I guessed the twist basically immediately, but everything else is spot-on. I liked all the little designs for the things that had to work for animals of various sizes, and more generally the movie was pretty. As everyone else has noted, great story too.

     

    The Nice Guys - I was hoping I'd like this even more than I did, but I still liked it pretty well. Nothing will ever top Kiss Kiss Bang Bang I guess, but this is pretty good.

     

    Ghostbusters - Really funny, but like Zootopia it sort of ran out of steam in the last act. I actually liked the action sequence, though, which was nice.

     

    Captain America: Civil War - For whatever reason I like all the Marvel movies, even the shitty ones. This wasn't a shitty one but it wasn't really anything special. I don't really know why I like all the Marvel movies but whatever that reason is, I think that's the reason I like this movie. 

     

    Star Trek Beyond - Jokes were good, everything else was yawn. It's hilarious how Kirk just continually fucks everything up and keeps getting rewarded for it.

     

     

  6. Posted

    6 hours ago, aoanla said:

    I'm just as sad about it as you are, especially when people start rolling out attacks on me for just having an opinion.

    I'm sorry if I came across as attacking you. I wasn't attacking you.

     

    6 hours ago, aoanla said:

    "gamer invested in... clearly inadequate definition" (begging the question of what an "adequate" definition would be, other than one which agrees with Tycho, plus also attempting to categorise me as a "gamer" in a sense which is clearly intended to be both pejorative and imply a connection to various unpleasant online groups - which I've defended myself from in the past).

    I take it to be pretty uncontroverisal that an adequate definition has to cover how the word is used. That is in fact literally the only job a definition has. A definition that does not match the word's usage is simply not a definition. It is something else. A definition's only job is to match how the word is used. We don't define words for other reasons. A dictionary doesn't have any other agenda. A dictionary's sole job is to report on usage. I didn't mean "gamer" to be pejorative, I simply meant to point out that the only people who seem to have these odd ideas about what the word "game" means are gamers, who are too close to the medium to realize that there is a vast group of people out there using words in ways that gamers don't use words. I certainly did not mean to connect you to various unpleasant online groups.

     

    6 hours ago, aoanla said:

    In actual reality, my position is based partly on talking to actual humans who aren't regular players of video games, who were honestly confused by why some things were being called games, when they didn't seem to be games.

    Yes, like I said, if you talk to gamers you can find people for whom your definition is an accurate one. But gamers are a tiny minority of the population - if we wrote dictionaries like this, they'd be a fucking mess. If you want to stipulate something like "in the context of a certain part of gamer subculture, the word 'game' clearly refers to..." I would have no issue with this. You'd be correct, in fact! In many parts of gamer subculture, 'game' has a warped meaning compared to what it means more generally in English. But that's not your argument: your argument was that 'game' means something else full stop, which is manifestly false.

     

    6 hours ago, aoanla said:

    But, *obviously*, I have to be some evil purist "gamer" trying to "defend" games from something.

    I don't recall calling you evil or a purist or accusing you of trying to defend games. Given the fact that you explicitly noted that you don't take "game" to be a positive term and "non-game" to be a negative term, these would have been odd accusations to make, don't you think?

     

    6 hours ago, aoanla said:

    I'm sorry that this is such a trigger for some people in this community that they can't help bringing their own baggage into discussions - the last time I made a harmless aside, it turned into practically the entire forum attacking me ["thanks" to mods splitting out the attacks into their own thread, removing context for later people who just piled on], and drove me out for some time. I really don't want that to happen again.

    I apologize for all those other people attacking you. I did not attack you, or at least I did not mean to appear to have attacked you. I'm a philosopher by training, and in philosophy this is how we all talk to each other. It definitely comes off as snippy and aggressive to normal people, and it's hard to break that habit.

     

    6 hours ago, aoanla said:

    So, you know, Tycho, you just believe what you gotta believe. Maybe I kill kittens, too?

    I think you've definitely made as many assumptions about my character and my tone as you think I've made about yours, at the very least, so I'd be on the hook for kitten killing too if any of that is in the offing.

  8. Posted

    At that point you're clearly just calling games not-games (toys, art-pieces, whatever) in order to preserve the adequacy of your definition. If you ask literally any human being other than a gamer invested in defending their clearly inadequate definition of games whether Minecraft, Proteus, and Animal Crossing are video games, they will say "yes" and probably look at you weirdly for asking a question that obvious. You may lament the fact that people talk so sloppily by using the word "game" to describe things that to you are not "properly" games, but the way language works is that people use words to mean what they actually mean, not what you wish they would mean or what you think they should mean.

  12. Posted

    31 minutes ago, osmosisch said:

    I love love love this game, but it's driving me absolutely bananas that you can't as far as I can see restart a level easily, while at the same time limiting the amount of savegames you can make. I mean, what?

    In January they're adding a patch that will let you replay specific levels, so hopefully that will include a level restart.

  16. Posted

    The way Jake quickly rattled off all the work that went into making the Idle Thumbs logo animation for the stream (with the various Windows screensavers etc.) just hammers home for the millionth time how tremendous his attention to detail, aesthetic sensibilities, and general on-top-of-it-ness are. That really goes for lots of the Thumbs, in fact, and I think it's one of the reasons the podcast they churn out is so enjoyable. They're just super capable folks, which really carries over into the conversations they have with with each other and with Nick.