singlespace
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Posts posted by singlespace
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Recently I've been thinking that I'm generally too negative on the Interwebs, not just in opinion, but also just in general tone and I think I can see it others as well.
There was a study a few months ago which looked at emotional contagions on a massive scale in social networks. The study was looking at how rain affects the emotional content of status messages, and how those who view the negative status messages show a similar shift in the emotional content of their status messages even though they were not subject to the weather at all. They went on to show how emotions propagate through social networks like a contagion and went onto suggest that social networks increase the synchronicity of global emotions.
The thing that struck me was how the people several steps down the chain were still measurably afflicted by the negative emotions of a person they had never met from weather they never experienced. Just a friend of a friend of friend had a bad day and a portion of that day was inherited by a swath of others.
It feels a bit weird knowing that your emotions, as conveyed by writing, can have a material impact on how a stranger, who never even read what you wrote, feels.
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Okay, so a friend was really insisting that I watch the Game Grumps play through the PT. One of them had played it before and knew how to get through things, but he didn't tell the other, and was BS'ing himself along.
This sold me on the concept way better than a couple streams I watched. It was more concise and tightly woven together. It sucks that someone has to have foresight to make it this way, but now I enjoyed it.
You should try playing P.T. — watching someone play a game isn't the same thing as playing it yourself and some of the game is dynamic, though it's a bit hard to pin down what makes it tick. If you're going to try out P.T. yourself, you might want to skip these, but here are some examples from other playthroughs that have different things occurring:
http://i1081.photobucket.com/albums/j345/growthetruth/window-ghost-silent-hill.jpg
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Absolutely. The fact that there was nowhere near this sort of blowup about the ACTUAL quid pro quo arrangements that many youtubers engage in speaks volumes. Add to that all the crazy promotional stuff large publishers do for journalists, sending them shit, having them out to the desert to shoot guns for no fucking reason, etc., and THIS is what the supposed paragons of ethics choose to blow up over? Over a text adventure that got significantly less attention than your CODs and Battlefields, than even several other indie games?
It's pretty obvious it's people who already hated Quinn and are using the incident to pile more hate on. So much more. It's despicable.
If it were a question solely about journalistic integrity, then I don't even see why Quinn would be discussed at all outside of a cursory mention. It's up to the journalist to recuse themselves properly and what not.
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I get what the rest of your post is saying, but on this point, I just wanted to note something. You're right that it was meant to establish tone, but they gave it a goal to chase, and in chasing that goal there's an increasing chance of monotony to settle in (rather than terror and hesitation). Even in Danielle's stream of the PT, as much as they were terrified to start, they eventually broke down into jabbing at Kojima the same way I was. There was too much time spent in the same place doing the same thing. If Kojima had practiced some brevity, maybe the impact could've struck at its best. Timing is everything.
For sure, I didn't mean to discount your experience: it does lose a great deal of it's impact over uneventful repetitions, but I can't help but feel that some of that comes from having the intended surprise ending spoiled. All of these establishments playing P.T. knew that it was a Kojima game that had a definite ending before they even started playing and I feel like that this knowledge coloured their expectations going into it.
If they had gone into P.T. having heard it's an interesting thing to check out that didn't really have an ending, I feel like people would have played what was there without this drive to play exhaustively until they reached the end. They would have played what was interesting then left it at that thinking that it just never ended, but instead people like Patrick Klepek and the crew over at Shacknews played P.T. incessantly past the point interest because they knew there was a definite ending and reveal trailer waiting for them at the laborious end.
If you consider that all most all of the monotonous materials towards the end is entirely geared towards unlocking the reveal, it feels a bit more fair to say the actual intended content was only a few minutes and the rest only existed for the sake of the intended quasi-ARG.
It did drag on, it did lose impact, and it was monotonous after the content was exhausted yet the game didn't end, but I don't think it's fair to blame that on Kojima's typical loquaciousness: it wasn't done for the sake of exposition, but rather because he thought that people wouldn't realize there was a trailer at the end it would take the dedicated few week or more to find it.
I guess the crux of what I've been trying to say is that because P.T.'s experience is affected so much by the intentions under which it was made, we should give some consideration to those intentions when looking at P.T. in a critical fashion.
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Something that is constructed specifically to "mess with your head" is something that I'll see through right away. The original Silent Hill was actually rather terrifying to me because the impending danger and unknown qualities also carried gameplay consequences with them. As in, you die.... But being presented with, "Whoa isn't that weird and scary?!" doesn't do it for me. I think Rob Zombie films were the last straw in my realization of this and it's carried over to video games I guess. Or maybe I'm truly desensitized to things. Knowing it's fiction just has me shrugging it off.
I think that's a matter of immersion in the sense that if the tangible aspects of experience are sufficiently convincing, you're willing to believe the presented situation. Part of the reason why things like VR are so seductive is because they allow a greater degree of immersion and more people to cross that line of suspended disbelief.
The big thing with P.T. was not only very well realized environment, crafted to be realistic, but also perhaps the first fleshed out example of how powerful physically based rendering (PBR) techniques can be in interactive mediums, which is to say this is possibly the first time a physically "accurate" approximation of how light reacts in reality has been leveraged in the games medium, or at least the first one I've seen.
With P.T.'s degree of graphical realism, many people were able to believe in the environments and situations they were presented in minutes if not seconds. You saw people who regularly play horror games and typically weren't easily scared caught in moments where they would lose reason and just run through the environment in futile attempt to escape. That's an accomplishment.
I don't believe that anyone is immune to this kind of immersion, it's just a matter of to what degree of realism is required. For example, in reality, if someone told you to not worry that the gun they were holding was not loaded then put it against your temple, how many people could really say they felt nothing at all at the action? Probably only those with psychological conditions. As powerful as the neocortex is, the limbic and basal ganglia are not things you can simply ignore.
I get what you're saying — actual consequential situations inspires belief — but P.T. wasn't meant to be comparable to a fleshed out game. P.T. was all about tone, not mechanics or narrative or anything else.
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In the background of Shut Up and Sit Down's review:
http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/review-sherlock-holmes-consulting-detective/
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I think it's very intentional that they labelled this a preview trailer as opposed to a demo, preview, or any such thing. It was created as a sample of the feel rather than the particular details of mechanics or implementation. This is supported by Kojima's comments on how little has actually been decided on what the actual game will be, hence it would be more fair to treat this more akin to concept art as opposed to a fleshed out game or demo.
Mington's comment bears repeating: the interactive sections of the P.T. were meant as something akin to an ARG where the intention was that it would take the community week or more to discover what P.T. was. The mechanics were intentionally obtuse and clunky because it was both meant to extend the duration required to reach the reveal trailer at the end as well as attempting to mimic a rough finish to make it plausible that P.T. was created by an unknown indie team. The original intention was not to reveal who or what P.T. was until someone reached the end of the preview trailer.
Though it drags on by design, there's no denying that the first impressions of the P.T. are very visceral. The space is believable enough that even with minimal interaction with the game space, people buy into the fiction immediately and that's quite an amazing feat considering that the interactive trailer consisted of a single hallway where your interactions were largely limited to zooming in and walking around.
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I don't know why you'd hire a distinctive artist to do your concept art and then not make that. I was bitterly disappointed when Metroid Prime's concept art was cool and creepy and nothing at all like the actual in-game stuff, as nice as it was.
It's not exactly common though. I have never seen an ingame screenshot for any game that has been more faithful to the concept art than that one and I do enjoy looking through concept art for games I've played.
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It's really weird that PT is so similar to a lot of the indie FPS horror games that have been all the rage, but with so much more polish.
"We wanted this game to look like it came from an independent developer..." —Hideo Kojima
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That's really faithful to the concept art, isn't it?
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So a 4 vs 1 action RPG with 4 players vs 1 game master who controls the environment and enemies. Could be interesting.
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"Well, no water for me today. Guess that means it's sex-scene day."
Hilariously, and disturbingly, accurate:
"You have no idea what goes into the lead up to a scene like that. It was a year ago — I know that exactly because it was May 21. I stopped drinking water for 24 hours, I pumped up on set for about an hour before shooting. And fell asleep by 2 o'clock."
—Hugh Jackman talking about The Wolverine
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I'm aware of what it takes for bodybuilding and what not, but it's fascinating that Hollywood has essentially adopted the same techniques, training regiments, and nutrition. The article talks about peak conditioning, cutting, and the professional trainers that get the actors into the crazy shape that we expect comic book superheroes and more to have.
It's not just the push-ups and what not, I just thought that was funny, studios integrate the shooting schedules and training plans very early on so that they can have actors at their absolute most cut for the scenes where it will show the most. They'll rotate off carbs, load up on short cardio, and dehydrate just like body builders. The article discusses how some of the first questions specialists will ask is when will their actors be shooting topless and sex scenes. It's an interesting article.
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For more people interested in the crazy transformations that male action-movie actors are now going through, Men's Journal ran an article on it a couple months ago that I thought was pretty interesting (albeit a bit lengthy and paginated):
http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/building-a-bigger-action-hero-20140418
That's a pretty interesting article. Imagining an actor quickly blasting out dozens of push-ups then yelling "Take the picture now! Take it now!" is surreal.
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I sift through my RSS feed for whatever looks interesting. Mostly it's from Polygon and Giant Bomb, but RPS, Gameological, Grantland, etc. are in the feed as well as specific developers and specialty content like Campo Santo and Soren Johnson's Designer Notes.
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Trump reviews all the Naxx cards!
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My friend hiked the PCT and I am jealous of him (and you) for doing backcountry hiking in Yosemite. We actually did a fair amount of research to try and pick the most out of the way and spaced campsites we could find. We ended up at the edge of the campground, backed against a trail that wound out to a huge meadow which looked exactly like we wanted one piece of the game to look, so that was pretty sweet. We had two larger adjacent sites, so we dragged the picnic tables together to have a central food/fire/sitting area and filled the rest with tents, and it worked out well.
Sounds like the campgrounds at Yosemite are well setup! Some of the parks up here in Canada are pretty tightly packed from a severe lack of budgets.
PCT is definitely on my todo list! I had a shorter distance permit for PCT and went from somewhere around King's Canyon down to Mount Whitney -- was a really beautiful hike. If you get a chance, definitely check out backcountry anywhere around Yosemite/Sierra/Inyo, outside of being amazing places, it's really wonder for their rules on where you can camp and how few people per a square kilometre they allow into the backcountry. I found places like Colorado and the parks out east to be a bit crowded -- you'll bump into people in the backcountry -- but out in California I went days without seeing a sign of anyone else. Maybe I was lucky, but I prefer to think that it was good planning on the part of the park rangers.
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Nah that would have been too extreme for the time / prep we had. We did the vernal falls / mist trail to the top of the first falls, then went back down a different way. We also went up to one of the lookout towers in the park, which was fantastic for the views and reference photos, and hiked a sequoia grove for the folks who had never seen big California redwoods before. We also did some local loops by our campsite of a meadow there on the evening before our one full day.
Cool, I've wanted to check out Vernal Falls, but the last few times I've been out west have been for climbing and backcountry in the mountains, which didn't leave much time for detours unfortunately. How did you find the sites? Was the spacing between groups pretty good?
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Still, I'm with Nels, Yosemite Netrunner is kinda gross. Why drive for hours into the boonies, if you're gonna take your man cave with you? Nature is badass on its own. It is fantastic. Any nature anywhere is. You had super limited time, why not commune with it more? You can play board games wherever. We live such sterile lives in the west, we're just not required to even notice the real world around us for our survival. When you go to a sanctuary where the real world is not thoroughly overfucked by man's hand, why ignore it? Just personally, I would've been all the more FNA about all of these Firewatch-tangential investigative chatterings and videos if they featured a little more awe in the face of nature, which I took to be the point of exploring real outdoors for the game in the first place. To make it real.
I'm all for the leave no traces philosophy, even in terms of things like light and sound. I think that the further we go into wilderness the more respect and reverence we should have for our surrounding, especially since the world is a crowded place and it is very rare to have moments where you are really alone. It would be a terrible thing if nature preserves and wilderness parks like Yosemite became more a kin to Everest where it's next to impossible to escape the civilization, but what I'm not sure of is what's more or less artificial: is ignoring all the trappings of civilization more or less honest than bring some small tokens off who you are for the majority of your life. If it affects no one else, if it doesn't leave a trace, is it better or worse to bring a bit of your real life with you?
Some of my happiest memories of the outdoors have been the stupidest of civilization fuelled things. I remember meeting up with climbing friends who had been away from home for months and how happy they were to eat something that wasn't from a bag or can, or how happy I was finding this grocery store that might have come straight out of the 80s in a tiny village in Spain after having spent two weeks in the Pyrenees. There are so many little things that bring you so much joy after being away from civilization. Just seeing different faces feels like a strange novelty.
There also gaps in the day that you never knew existed. Technology has effectively erased them from existence, but out in the wild they still exist. There's this awkward moment between evening and night where it's too dark to see, but too early to sleep. This moment just before dawn where the dim morning light catches in your tent like a thousand Watt lightbulb. Or when the weather has decided that it's a good time for 24 hours of downpour. Setting up camp, and taking care of all the evening routine only takes so long, then you're left with these unreasonable hours. It's too dark, or too wet, or too cold, or all sort of things that conspire to keep in pinned to single point on a map.
In those empty hours you need to interact with something. Usually that something is your hiking partner because they make better conversational partners than titanium spoons or tent poles. So you talk, and talk inevitably turns to life, then to those things you miss, and eventually to food. I feel like socialization becomes almost a necessity after awhile. Whether that come in the form of idle chatter or playing card games seems a bit irrelevant to me. Whether you're talking, or playing cards, or reading a book, or just dreaming of somewhere else, you're bring a bit of civilization with you.
I feel like being alone in the outdoor breeds a certain kind of introspection, and the only things that can be found there are the things you left behind in the real world. You look at your life much differently, but none the less it's still your life and not nature you're thinking about.
Not sure where I'm going with this, but I just feel as though it might not be a bad thing to be playing Netrunner in Yosemite.
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Basically an entire day of the trip was spent on what amounted to a 12-mile hike that involved more vertical footage than I have ever covered with my own feet in one continuous streak. The only thing the video covers is the part when we were just goofing around eating and unwinding at the end of the nature-filled days, because those were the only bits where we had a video camera out and in frequent usage.
Did you happen to climb up the backside of Half Dome? The vertical drop is somewhat mind boggling.
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Breaks my heart to hear Jake badmouth shitty nature a while back (it's just in nature's nature to burn down sometimes, it's fine, shh) and then see this camping thing with tables and chairs and board games... Lately, surrendering to nature is the closest thing I've had to a reliably fulfilling religious experience. I should really go on a lengthier road trip through state and national parks one of these days.
I don't think you can expect everyone to appreciate nature in the same way. There's a wealth of experiences out there and what one person finds liberating another may find utterly oppressing. It takes a certain degree of commitment to do something like the John Muir that not everyone has the disposition or chance to enjoy. The same could be said about the entire gamut of the outdoors, so why look down on car camping? In the end, they're all about experiencing nature in a respectful manner.
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You, Sir, are the best.
Feminism
in Idle Banter
Posted
Jesus, if things weren't insane enough, Phil Fish was doxxed a few hours ago apparently for defending Zoe Quinn. People are saying addresses, phone numbers, passwords, bank accounts, financials, pretty much everything for Polytron.