filk

First of all, I worry I came off completely against subtlety. I chose to play devil's advocate in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of why I implicitly, mostly from an aesthetic perspective, appreciate subtlety. What follows may come across as argumentative, but it is really agreement and curiosity flavored with an aggressive conversational style. I agree with most of your points, and the first one most. To build a better understanding, we probably have to represent internalized processes as they really are: alien, malformed experiences. I'm not sure I agree about subtlety exploding the range of topics, though. The thought of giving up on solid understanding of phenomena in our social world strikes me as a sad one. Oddly, I think that striving to express the difficult concretely is one of those subtly expressed themes. Do you have any examples of topics that cannot be expressed bluntly? In my relationships (which are arguably the most sensitive topics in my life) I actually strive for bluntness, because contextually it helps my partner reach an understanding. Perhaps in that context it's best to have bluntness be the punctuation mark to a less literal description of sensation. I think fantasy authors tend to come at things from a very different angle. They are less concerned with recreating or expressing human experience and more with creating worlds, exploring fictional history and consequence, or providing adventure. Human experience tends to suffer in this genre not because it's impossible to do, but because of author priorities. So perhaps you have subtlety in the historical movements, but all of these stories are fundamentally from the perspectives of human beings, and even the most highly regarded fantasy I've read (i.e. ASOIAF) readily falls prey to characters who: 1) Are archetypes or even caricatures. 2) Understand and internalize their own motivations completely. 3) Undergo dramatic personal change as a result of thought processes that are almost too logical. As an example, the amount of time Cersei Lannister spends internalizing her justifications of action is, to me, absurd. She is not a believable character. I suppose it's the argument that authorial intent does not matter to the subject. I agree with this to various degrees depending on the position of the moon, but I have to wonder if, then, is the artistic value of literature summarized completely in its ability to evoke response? Whether that response be thought, action, reflection.... From that perspective, to me, something like Telegraph Avenue was a failure. Mechanically (I don't know literature terms) I found it more or less delightful, but my lack of personal experience with the themes I extracted (except perhaps obsession with media, which I had not considered until this very moment) left me floating and thoughtless for much of the book. I really look forward to the upcoming discussion of this book, as I think it will be more divisive than uniformly positive.

Ran Boyle Manor in 4 minutes 54 seconds. And I made a lot of mistakes.

Fifth run finished in less than three hours. You get enough runes for essential abilities (blink 2, possession, double jump) without even going out of your way. If I had not worried about being caught, I wonder how fast I could go...

Ha-HA. Fifth run racing through as fast as I can to get the Slackjaw quests achievement. I am such a sucker.

This is the first game where I wish I was recording myself play, just to relive the best moments later.

Clean hands twist! Spoilers for last two missions: The sheer multitude of things to do in Dishonored is fantastic.

I should definitely play with razors more. I am on my fourth run now, which is I guess turning into a speed run. First time on Very Hard, and no mission has taken me more than 30 minutes including death reloads. I have never once in my life played a game four times back to back before, and I still want to go back and get some of the achievements after this (so far I have not been achievement hunting at all).

True. I guess he just didn't tonally scream "nerd" to me. I am a nerd and don't have much of a way with women . Addendum: Currently have a girlfriend of 2 years, way with women would now be a liability.

Now that you mention it, the references seem clumsy to me as well. Going back to the SF-knowledge scene, Archy suddenly reminisces about his early life as a "nerd". Nothing about Archy suggests this to me, with his past experience seemingly primarily in music, and given his extensive cheating he seems to have a way with women. Archy typifies this sort of thing even more with the early references to Meditations. Apparently he carries a copy with him all the time. I interpreted this as kind of a "Chekov's Meditations" and expected it to come out at a critical moment of character development, but after the first 100 pages or so Archy stops caring about the book or even patterning his actions on Stoic philosophy.

Those early conversations in Brokeland would have worked really well on TV.

AGH I LOVE THIS GAME SO MUCH. Lots of spoilers in this post. *Edit* Sorry, didn't see anyone else using spoiler tags in the thread so made some assumptions.

About 75% through the book now, and I feel like my racial imagery issues are more or less settled. Now that the book isn't introducing too many characters on a regular basis, I've been able to stabilize my images and voices for everyone else. I both loved and hated the chapter with Fifty-Four soaring over Oakland. Some poignant little moment in there, but I don't know that it gained anything from being one giant running sentence like that. It felt like experimentation for the sake of experimentation

I am incredibly uncomfortable with my reaction to this book. As a preface, I am born, raised, and living in southern Ontario. I grew up in a small, homogenous caucasian town and now live in a city that is composed primarily of college students, with an ethnic distribution leaning heavily towards caucasian and oriental people. To sum it up, I have never really been exposed to black culture or even black people. Reading this book, I'm disappointed with myself in many ways. The most forgivable slight is that I don't pick up on any of the cultural references. But more than that, I immediately picture most characters as caucasian upon introduction despite the novel taking place in a largely black community. I still picture Gwen as kind of a caucasianized african-american, having taken a chapter or two to realize her background. Half the time I feel like the voices I give the characters are over-the-top ethnically inspired. Basically I feel like a horribly ignorant white person. That said, I am enjoying the book. I really like Julie's character (very possibly because I can identify most with a young caucasian male, damn) as well as Archy. I'm struggling enough with the style of reference-and-simile-ridden prose that I haven't been able to tease out much in terms of theme or even plot, but as a sequence of vignettes it's charming at least.

I'm kind of the opposite, where the more I play the more I like the story. But I think I may just be buying in due to overexposure. I'm on my third playthrough now, which is unheard of for me.

That's definitely true for some things, and this game isn't as bad about it as Deus Ex. But it does often feel to me like there's huge gaps in info. Again I use the Sokolov example. Four maps to the bridge and no way of knowing (besides video game metaknowledge that forward = good) that Sokolov's house is in the North End, despite that being something Corvo would obviously have been told. Even when you find the paper map, your only indication is that there is a nicer-looking atrium in the North End.

This approach could be interesting in the context of the kind of morality Dishonored tries to set up. The major consequences of High/Low chaos are your influence on Emily, and the tone of the last mission. Both of these are more reflections of your personality than any explicit action you take, so it would actually fit within the constraints of the game to judge you based on all of your actions, and not just the actions you succeeded at. On the other hand, this would lead to awful situations where, when pressed with conflict, you simply give up and die because you dare not take a life. One thing that bothers me to no end about this game (and Deus Ex Human Revolution before it) is the poor ways of communicating information to the player. Every since the floating objective marker was introduced, even developers of games such as these design with the assumption that the player has a homing beacon pointing where they need to go. Thus, there is no information given in any other way. For example, in DXHR, things like "disable the radio towers", leaving you to meticulously crawl over an area looking for 5 unmarked objects of interest. Or in this game, dropping you in a space, often with no map or description of your objectives. How am I supposed to no where Sokolov's house is? Am I to believe that the Loyalists have no intelligence agency that could have sketched out a rough map? The last thing I want is magical GPS like in DXHR, but why not paper maps like in Thief, or the ship level of Deus Ex 1? I very rarely feel okay saying this, but it seems like lazy game design and I think games suffer for it.

Definitely. Played my first game this way. Doing a ghost/nonlethal/flesh and blood run now, and thinking of changing tacks to restart at mission begin instead of compulsively quickloading on detection. Make a roguelike of it.

Ouch, quite expensive. I'm 20 pages in an finding it quite out of my depth subject-wise, but the prose is lovely. What is next month's book? If its another newer release, I'd like to place a hold at my library so that I can get it in time. Can't really afford new releases every month.

Don't worry about it your first time. Baldur's Gate is one of those games (like Morrowind) that if you try and play the first time with mods, you spend so much time tweaking and modding (with no sense of the vanilla game) that by the time you enter the game you are weary and give up.

I've been playing Guild Wars 2 a fair amount lately, and at first, I didn't like it at all. It does as much handholding as any other MMO, encouraging you to keep your map up and follow the waypoints. Then, a couple days ago, I consciously shifted the "mode" in which I was interpreting the game in an effort to fix this. Now, I'm playing it more like something like Skyrim. I go off in a direction and explore, and sometimes awesome shit happens (with other people!) While before the game felt like a pretty funnel, now it feels genuinely like the great wide world that I was hoping it would be. What I've been wondering is, is it a sign of a bad game that it requires a conscious step back and reinterpretation of the game's goals by the player for it to really succeed? I feel like this is something that is generally not forgiven. One example is Assassin's Creed, which was torn apart for the combat. What seems like the vast majority of players played the combat in a strictly counter-based mode, which made it long, boring and uninteresting. However (in my experience), if you shift your focus in Assassin's Creed to dispatching enemies as quickly as possible, the combat system becomes a very rhythmic, engrossing experience of risk and reward. I would argue that people would have enjoyed the first AC much more if they did this, but most reviewers (and players) tore it apart. Personally, I wish games facilitated getting you in the right mode more. We always hear that games are being changed to support mass audiences, but many of those mass market titles can still provide compelling experiences if the player makes the effort to engage. I can't help but wonder how many games I've written off because I wasn't able to notice the need for this mode switch and respond. Another recent example for me is FTL. I started playing without naming any of my crew or my ship. There's no indication really (especially if you've never really played any high-investment, death is death kind of game) that you should be investing time into the creation in order for you to get the most emotionally out of the experience. But once I started assigning names to my characters (and thinking of them by names instead of as anonymous dudes) the game became much more enjoyable and the emergent storyline much more powerful. Anyways, I was wondering if anyone else has had these experiences or has some feeling on how games could do this better. I'm kind of new to the forum but Idle Thumbs podcast discussion is good so I suspect you forum people have cool opinions.

I've been thinking about this more in the context of some XCOM: Enemy Unknown conversation I had on NeoGAF. One of the ways this state of mind thing becomes an issue all the time in games is cost-effectiveness. Probably one of the easiest ways in the world for developers to shoot themselves is to not make all options in the game cost-effective in at least a certain set of scenarios. In the context of XCOM, it seems some fans of the original series take issue with the tack the new game is taking by introducing an explicit cover mechanic. The argument goes: While the map looks like a 2+D navigable space, because the only cost-effective positions are behind cover, the interaction space the player actually engages in is quite smaller. If it only ever makes sense to move from cover to cover, then the game's map is really just a node graph with some fancy paint on top. Now, in XCOM's case I think this is probably not the case, but Assassin's Creed is the perfect example. Literally, the game has many combat options at any time, switching between enemies and weapons. However, in practice, it is most cost-effective to sit still and counter, so for many players the combat is actually just a one-button timing game. It takes a conscious effort on the part of the player to put themselves in a mental place where they are willing to sacrifice optimality to experience the breadth of game design. In general, I think most problems with many games are solved by putting yourself in a playful state of mind. If you're not exploring the mechanics and trying new things, you're essentially doing busy work. On the other hand, it seems kind of wasteful to devote so much clever, playful, creative energy to something as transient as a video game.