BFrank

Really disappointed about the turn this thread took and the tone from the folks in charge. Feel free to delete my account, I won't be back.

That line would be more 'oh snap' if he'd said censorship.

All great points, all agreed. And FWIW, I feel a little bad that I picked today to dog her on a forum for purely intellectual stuff. I really and truly hope the people who've threatened her see severe legal consequences. Death threats should be taken seriously and I hope in the future that we see more cops knocking on doors in response to these situations.

Like I said, she clears the low bar very easily. She cleared it in the first 10 minutes of her first video. I mean, if you're saying 'she's making these videos for babies who need 8 hours of content to be persuaded of the most obvious thing ever', then that's fine. Depressing, kinda, that people would be championing it. But if that's all she's shooting for, she got my agreement right away. I suspect she's hoping for more than that. I just don't think she's insightful enough to get there.

Couldn't possibly quantify that, it's just my overall sense. She was clearing the low bar ('there's some gross, sexist shit in video games') very easily, but most of her attempts to say anything beyond that rested on what seemed to me to be very iffy readings of the games in question. Sometimes she strikes me as being more in the mold of a Salon.com essay on 'How to Win the Debate at the Thanksgiving Table'. It's not really there to convince anyone who isn't already convinced, it's a catalog of ammo for an argument with douchebags.

As someone who continues to have this problem with her (and I hope her popularity leads to someone better coming along to pick up the torch), I'd argue that the charge of cherry picking is much, much more relevant in art/cultural criticism than it is in politics. At least in politics and economics you've got some hard, objective facts to work with. In criticism, you have to build the case that you're creating the best possible context in which to understand something. So you absolutely can't cherry pick, you can't just throw out 30 examples of a phenomenon when 7 of them are being mislabeled or fudged in some way. You have to be intellectually honest to a much higher degree because you need the reader/viewer to trust your judgement and trust that you're playing fair. I can't talk about Gertrude Stein in the same way I talk about the prison population or the minimum wage, there aren't facts and figures that will get me very far. Basically, criticism requires an insanely high hit to miss ratio. Cultural critics can come to all kinds of conclusions that I'm not on board with and I'll still enjoy reading what they've written, but when the process of getting there seems haphazard or lawyerly ('look at all this evidence, it speaks for itself'), the whole thing comes to a dead stop.

I was trying to say that it's a bad way to engage in a discussion. I don't want to derail a big thread over a minor point, but it rubbed me the wrong way and I said so in the least provocative way I could think of.

Done and done. Sincerely. Which isn't to say I endorse all of it (at all). But it seemed on topic and fair game, as far as those concepts go.

This question, re: forums, is turtles all the way down.

I had a brain fart and searched fruitlessly for variations on 'The Rekternational' yesterday.

No, thank you!

Maybe it's just because I heard a WoT ad on Marc Maron's podcast this week, but I don't think you guys should have qualms about it. The ad is clearly an ad, it's not ambiguous in the flow of the show, and the product isn't some disgusting ripoff that you'd normally steer people away from.

Really? I'd say more than half the Dota games I'm in have no voice chat (on my side) at all. I assume some of that is because you get matched up with a party who are all on mumble/skype together.

I think the message has gotten out among pubsters (like me) that using the voice comms for 'missing' and 'such and such power is on cooldown for 15 seconds' work a whole lot better than using your mic. The same thing has happened in TF2 over the years. The voice chat ends up being used for socializing more than coordinating, and tactical elements like 'sentry ahead'/'uber'/'spy' are better communicated using the in-game prompts. I suspect that half the Dota people I play with auto-mute everyone, which is an impulse I understand. I'm sure the dynamic is different when you queue with a regular group.

IMO, Dota2's gotten significantly friendlier in the last year or so. I'm convinced that the introduction of ranked mode self-segregated a bunch of the hotheads and has resulted in a much more relaxed pub atmosphere. It's still an intimate game where your teammates can cause frustration, but at least I'm not running out of reports every week.

There really are a whole host of explicit strategies where teams gamble on blowing their opponents out (or avoiding being blown out). Everyone I know who plays Dota immediately goes to 'it's like basketball' when they describe the strategy because there's such an emphasis on 'getting someone going' and how different the body types and roles are. Even the whole '1st position through 5th position' thing in Dota correlates strongly to how NBA teams think of their scorers and the amount of opportunities that you give to them.

I think you see sports teams come out with a gameplan that minimizes the chance of a game being over by halftime, especially if it's something like an NBA playoff series. There's a recognition that your fans don't want to watch a half of foregone conclusions, and that any team good enough to compete should be good enough to make it interesting for at least a half hour. So, I'd call it bad coaching when you lose game 4 at the 14 minute mark. Elimination games are usually about keeping it close and giving yourself some opportunities at the end.

Just block people who message you about trading. I've got some rare stuffs in TF2, and I think I've been messaged about it all of 3 times ever. I mute more people in a single game of Dota2 than I have in my thousands of hours of TF2.

That's definitely true. I'd say Hearthstone works hard to give you the impression that the rare cards are game breakers (that's how they make the money) even when they're a little less versatile than their common counterparts. People get off on delivering a 'humiliating' beatdown in that game and structure their decks around it, probably to their own detriment. The satisfying plays and the best ones frequently don't match up.

I think what you can give Dragon's Crown is that it's weird. It doesn't come off like a lazy attempt at leveraging sexuality to pander to an audience. If anything, that game's character design seemed like a heroic act of self-sabotage. They had to know people were going to be confused/annoyed by it and plowed ahead anyway.

I saw Citizen Kane for the first time 15 years ago (so I'd grown up on a steady diet of post-Kane movies, obviously) and it blew my fucking mind. It's got so much going on in it, and almost no element feels like it shouldn't be there.

5$ holla holla pink wheel http://www.amazon.com/Nintendo-Wii-Wheel-PINK/dp/B002B7E3B2/ref=pd_sim_pc_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0D9QCFB7C0YBE1D0TW03

The wheel works the same in MKWii and MK8. I don't know about 'more intuitive than a thumb on a stick', but you've got more degrees of turning available to you than you do on a stick. If you think about how a typical race turns out, you spend most of your time drifting one direction or another anyway. Having a full 180 degrees of motion for those mid-drift adjustments is meaningful. Going absolutely straight doesn't end up being a thing that comes up very often. But I'm someone who tends to dive into 'controls with a learning curve' head first. If you've got a decade of Karting under your belt, it can be a hard sell.

Yeah, that sounds uncomfortable! Anyway, great show Thumbs.

I got the first game as a mail in rebate when I picked up the Genesis, and I was obsessed with it at the time. Great music, incredible looking, and legitimately hip. I remember getting it and thinking that the Mario games were better mechanically, but the impression the first Sonic game left me with was really positive. It always seemed to me that Sonic became ever-more for children, while Mario drifted the opposite direction and became an 'all ages, everyone' kinda thing.