Joewintergreen

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Posts posted by Joewintergreen

  1. Posted

    While I generally disagree with every point she makes I will be watching the rest of the series and I look forward to seeing what she does with part 2. I can't help but feel that given the time and money someone could just as easily build a case for any trope they want in video games, such as; "look how often business people need to be saved" and "look at how violent men are they will kill hundreds of people with no remorse".

     

    If it's a real trope that exists, of course they could. So what? This isn't about those tropes, it's about "tropes versus women". It's in the title, there.

    Also, it's not about building a case for those tropes. There's nothing to build. They very clearly exist and are prevalent. Did you mean a case against those tropes? 

  2. Posted

    Are you referring to a woman's clothing being the reason for rape? I also live in Melbourne and use to live in Qld, the only time I've ever encountered it was when it was all over the news after that Muslim guy made the comparison to uncovered meat.

     

    Edit: After watching the video twice and reading some of the comments in this thread I just don't understand why everyone thinks she's hit the nail on the head. All I see is a few cherry picked examples and what seems to be an unnecessarily in-depth analysis of the plot in the Mario games; the Princess of the Mushroom Kingdom has been kidnapped by a dinosaur and you must take the whole of an Italian plumber to save her. It seems insane to me that anyone could attempt to use this as any kind of argument for anything.

    Yes, though not as blatantly as that guy - less "she was raped because she was wearing those clothes" as "that's awful, but you really shouldn't dress like that and be alone at night".

     

    Re your edit, she did indeed pick examples of the trope the episode was about. The Mario thing isn't an unnecessarily in-depth analysis, it's showing Peach as an example of a character who only ever exists as an example of the trope, and giving appropriate context for that.

     

    This episode just illustrates the trope, it's not really even being used as an argument for anything yet. It seems like the only disagreements you could really have with what's in this video are "I disagree that this trope exists!" which after watching the video would basically require doublethink, and "Yeah, but sexism isn't as big a deal as you're making out". You can't really argue that she's exaggerating by cherry picking examples, because her assertion isn't that x high percentage of games use the trope, she's just telling you what the trope is.

  3. Posted

    I live in Australia near a decent sized city. I guess sexism is less prevalent here, which is somewhat ironic because people here are known for using the word 'cunt' in every other sentence.

    I live in Melbourne and I hear that shit all the time. You're just keeping good company.

  6. Posted

    I'm going to do this quote-by-paragraph thing again, though probably I'll end up echoing TC. Also I'm super sleep deprived, this may not be up to my usual standard of discourse

    I'm a big believer that great artists ship. If you're constantly prototyping and you never actually finish a thing, get it out the door, see how people respond to it, and use that to inform your next thing, you are basically as much of a creative force as I am, with all these abandoned half-projects that never became A Thing That Exists.

    I more or less agree with this as far as it goes, but it still defines Valve as great artists, because, you know, they ship. And they only ever ship extremely high quality products.

    Also: yeah, great artists ship, but shitty artists also ship. Maybe great artists only ship when they've got something worth shipping, and recognise when they don't?

     

    Their high profitability per employee comes from two things: Steam, which is absurdly profitable, and them convincing the community to do their work, which they get their 30% off.

    I could be reading this wrong but it sounds like you're framing "convincing the community to do their work" as a negative thing? Also you forgot they make and sell extremely high quality video games.

     

    I want to touch on that more: Gabe Newell's publicly said that Valve's thing, if it has a thing, is finding resources that are under-utilised and seizing on them. TF2 is basically afloat due to Polycount's work, and yes some of those artists make quite a bit of money from that, but it feels like, if they're doing professional quality work, they could take that time they're spending making hats and make a real thing that they own 100% of and sell that.

    Well, guess what - that last part? Absolutely not true or there'd be no unemployed 3D artists. And there are a lot. As a 3D artist, even an extremely skilled one, you don't have a lot of opportunity to make money by yourself. You have to get a job contributing art to a game or a film or whatever. You could try just generating a shitton of generic assets and selling them to people who aren't able to find their own 3D artists, but there's a lot of those to go around so you probably won't make much. Valve have given solo 3D artists an opportunity to make money where there's been almost none before. 

    TF2 is also not afloat due to Polycount's work. Polycount helps. TF2 wasn't in dire straits before they started with the user generated hats.

     

    As for the culture that allows great ideas to bloom, how interesting it is that the designers of Counterstrike and Portal had to leave the company to work on their new thing. And Kim Swift left suspiciously soon after participating in a Experimental Gameplay panel on representing sex in games.

    Again, I have no idea why this is suspicious. It seems irrelevant to me, unless you know something I don't. 

    My impression of people leaving Valve because they couldn't make the game they wanted to there, so far, is their game can't have been that interesting. At Valve, you can just go ahead and make your game, assuming you can get the people you need interested. It's self-correcting, because if you can't get a few people interested, your thing probably wasn't interesting. Kim Swift left to make Quantum Conundrum, which was a pretty bad game without even a particularly interesting "core mechanic" or whatever. That one other guy leaves to make a tactical shooter of some kind. You can totally see why people at Valve might not have wanted to get behind these things.

     

    They have all that Steam money, so they don't have to actually do anything other than sit in the middle and take their cut; is it any wonder that the only concrete plan that we've heard from them about their future work is to give everyone a game store so they can sit between everyone and take their 30% cut? Do they actually intend to make any games any more?

    Like TC said, they're a large group of individually autonomous people who really like making games. They're probably going to make games. No employee at Valve is looking at Valve's finances and going "oh, we crossed Threshold X, we don't actually need to make games anymore". 

     

    You scoff, but think carefully: they don't have to make games to make money any more. Their business plan was to make money from games, not to make games, but because Doom was the biggest application on Windows. That business plan is now irrelevant. How many great ideas has Valve abandoned that could have changed the industry for the better had they been made by a company that was a little more hungry, that had to unify behind something they maybe don't believe in yet because it's either that or get new jobs? Do you think a hungry Valve would have let the Oculus Rift beat them to market? Do you think a hungry Valve would have been quite so proud of the physics-driven opening of Portal 2 if they had seen what Naughty Dog was doing with the collapsing buildings in Uncharted 2, a year and a half earlier?

    I don't think that Valve would see any advantage to beating the Oculus Rift to market. They aren't interested in entering areas that somebody else is handling competently. 

    But what the fuck is a hungry Valve? You're suggesting that it would be a better company if it wasn't flat? If it wasn't flat, it couldn't exist. They would get literally nothing done. I have a really hard time seeing what you're trying to say here. If a fictional company existed that wasn't organised the way Valve is, but which did employ all the same people as Valve does, which would be impossible, it would be a more productive company? What even is this.

     

    As for their management structure, how do they defend against office politics and unspoken power dynamics, or do they assume that they just don't exist, that people don't jostle for position, access and influence? Is there a grievance process? Is there a defence mechanism against bad actors? Against sexism and racism in the workplace? Or do they assume, like so many do, that culture without rules grows organically and cannot be attacked or subverted from within?

    There's a really interesting interview with the Economist In Residence at Valve that you might want to listen to. It's on some economics podcast, you should just be able to google it, and the host asks a lot of these kinds of questions and they're answered well. Czech that out.

     

    Here's why people deify them, to my mind: a> those early Steam sales, with ridiculous bargains on indie games just as the weakness of XBLA as a platform was becoming obvious, and b> they haven't yet fucked up big. It's not to do with the quality of their games at all, which, yeah, are great, but plenty of other studios do great work too. It's to do with the fuzzy positive memories of that time when you spent way too much money on way too many games, and it was easier to transfer that onto the company that owns the service because they never gave you a reason to hate them. It's exactly the same impulse that drives the console wars - doubling down on buyer's remorse by telling yourself that no, you actually made an amazing choice. But Steam isn't that much more respectful of you than XBLA or PSN. The contract still lets them weasel out of a class action, and they can change the rules at any time, and it's either agree to it or lose access to anything DRM'd.

    The bold part is incomprehensible to me. People get fuzzy memories out of spending too much money? Is this a real thing?

    I guess I can't really speak to the XBLA/PSN comparison because I have neither of those things.

     

    They can say what they want, but it's how they behave that's the true measure of how they really are.

     

    And they behave just like everyone else.

     

    They really really don't. They're unique in almost everything they do. The only example you've given is that they have a contract you have to agree to to use it, like every online service ever.

    I don't think I deify anything, but I do like Valve. I like them because the entire way they're structured encourages individual creativity and prioritises quality of life for the employees. And because they're super open about the way they operate and in everything they do that's not Episode 3. And because I, as some random internet nobody, can email them an interesting question and usually get a proper, genuine response back. And because they make really good video games. And because Gabe Newell bought me lunch one time.

     

    Other reasons too but let's face it the lunch thing is really the clincher.

  8. Posted

    They also do a hell of a lot more work than you ever see and work on more games than you ever hear about. Some people at Valve can spend years working on some completely new game and end up with something cool, and then not release it because they don't think it's good enough or they lose enthusiasm or whatever, and presumably it gets left on a hard drive over there and you never find out about it. 

    I heard an interview years ago with Gabe and someone else where the interviewer asked if they ever completely fail at game design, and they're all "oh man, remember that fairy game? with the spells and the gesture control? yeah that was retarded"

     

    Also a good example: TF2 taking a decade because they made a bunch of different TF2s and never talked about most of them

  10. Posted

    Oh okay. Yeah that's a super weird quote to me. Modellers already make models in the millions of polys and then simplify them down, texture artists already make their shit huge and resize it... seems like as the hardware gets better you just don't do that as much. Maybe he's talking about teams getting bigger but I don't think that needs to happen. I know if I get to start developing on UE4 any time soon I'll save hundreds of hours not having to build lighting or restart the engine to compile code.

    Man that's gon' be nice.

  11. Posted

    Y'know I just added up that the Wii U's made a tenth the splash of the Wii, the PS4 is a lot like a PS3 with More Graphics Technical, Zynga's dropping out of social to work on fucking casinos, and Unreal's publicly asking people to double their budgets and team sizes...

    The next few years of video games is starting to look fucking NOT GOOD.

    Not sure what you mean about Unreal? It seems to me it's going to be quite a lot cheaper to develop on UE4 than 3.

  12. Posted

    I played it with a pal for a few minutes. One of us usually had the problem of spawning as a non-plane in the center of the purple pillar in the middle (presumably the center of the map?) and not being able to get out of the pillar. When we didn't it was pretty cool. It took me a while to notice I could use WASD and flip upside down, that was super cool. I would like to be able to run around if I land on the ground that is not the ocean and maybe grapple to objects maybe. Also I totally saw the plane selection menu on the wall at the base of that pillar, loal.

  18. Posted

    All this chat makes me want to see a Black Mesa style remake.

    I pretty often get some kind of an itch to try to remake an old game on a modern engine, which I instantly have to reign in with "yeah dude you'd need a team and probably money to pay them with and you're way better off making something of your own anyway". But someone should totally do it.

     

    Lazyweb.

  20. Posted

    Yeah, one of the scariest parts for me so far (and I'm not far in, really) was I went back to the first deck where I'd seen and largely ignored one of those big yellow bots earlier (it had been disabled), and it wasn't there anymore, because for whatever reason it had woken up and started walking around. I only had a wrench and a shitty pistol so it turned into probably the closest thing to being Ripley in the original Alien I've experienced in a vidjagame. Probably this game is going to have more than one situation I could apply that to. 

  21. Posted

    Every time I've tried to before I've come away disappointed with myself. You really have to put some effort into not being some kind of a Modern Video Game Asshole about it when things are super complicated and difficult (and ugly). Also terrifying.

     

     

    edit: just stumbled upon the "videogame" -> "video game" word filter. clever girl

  24. Posted

    Oh god, that is monstrous. The most intense and insuperable pain I've ever experienced was the full dislocation of my right shoulder. Dealing with that as a matter of course doesn't even seem livable to me.

    she was suicidal for a while there

    It's also inconvenient because most people react to stuff like seizures in incredibly unhelpful ways. Never rely on the level-headedness of people around you to keep you from bashing your head against shit if you have a fit, folks!

  25. Posted

    Man I_smell, that is pretty whack. What was with the blood in your mouth? Bite your tongue or something?

    Closest I've come is being randomly super dizzy and almost falling over a few times for no adequately explored reason.

    I was around somebody for about a year who was super severely epileptic, so she'd have at least one full-on seizure most days. Apparently she had more than a hundred in a day one time. Those can be pretty unnerving. edit: oh yeah she also had some disorder where basically every bone in her body would dislocate super easily, so she'd often have to pop something back into place when she came round