tberton

Just finished Journey for the second time. What an amazing game, although I accidentally skipped the awesome second section this time around, which is disappointing. Still, it was incredible. The one-two punch of defeat and exhultation at the end is one of the most powerful game experiences out there.

Wow. I just read the last several pages and, like clyde, I want to say how impressed I am at the discussion. There's a lot of food for thought in here. I think a lot of the big points have been mentioned, but something that hasn't really been brought up is Chait's slippery use of "liberalism." This is pretty common in current political discourse in general, but I think it's particularly relevant to this discussion because part of Chait's argument is that call-out culture is "liberals attacking liberals." But what the hell do we mean when we say "liberal"? While he differentiates between "liberal" and "left" and discusses the historical origins of liberalism in the Enlightenment, he makes it seem as though that Enlightenment liberalism is the same thing that we talk about today when we say "liberal." That's not true at all. Enlightenment liberalism was about the free market economy, property rights, the primacy of the individual as the basis of society and the ability of man to perfect himself and the world around him. In that, it looks a lot more like today's "conservatism" or what's often called neo-liberalism. There wasn't much about race or gender or class in that thinking (heck, classical liberalism denies the existence of class at all). This is important because Chait takes liberalism's correctness as a given, while only picking out the parts of liberalism that appeal to him and not questioning them at all. He writes But he doesn't ask what "social progress" is or what a "free political marketplace" looks like. For a long time, "social progress" in liberalism was the Industrial Revolution, colonialism, Manifest Destiny and the White Man's Burden. A "free political marketplace" was one in which only propertied white men could vote. Now of course, the meanings of words change, but Chait uses this same word to deal with two very different ideas. And that conflation results in paragraphs like this one that ends the essay: Really, Jonathan Chait? Martin Luther King, Jr. was a democratic socialist; Jewish support groups like The Workmen's Circle were socialist; I don't have time to find sources right now, but if you look at the history of LGBT rights and women's rights, you'll find plenty of influential people who did not support "American liberalism." I don't mean this to be a linguistic "Gotcha!" but rather point out that Chait is framing his argument in a way to make it seem like "liberalism" has been historically able to introduce new people into its fold without outside pressure from "non-liberal" groups. That's simply not true. My broader point is that "liberalism", along with the whole "right-centre-left" spectrum, as a political concept is less than useless and needs to be exchanged for something more specific.

That's really cool! I don't know many people who work on medieval history. Nearly everybody in my department is either a modernist or early modernist.

I definitely do agree that searching out sidequests can feel like you're putting time into something that will disappear. Hopefully the improved Bomber's Notebook will alleviate that problem a bit.

Gormongous, out of curiosity, what's your dissertation on?

Dewar, did you ever escape being a Deku Scrub? Because it sounds like you never completed the prologue. If that's the case, I agree that it's bullshit that they don't let you save in that part.

Have you played Pac-Man? This is a serious question. Pac-Man is one of the purest distillations of fun in a video game (I'd count Warioware in this category as well). It should be played by everybody.

I can't remember if I've skipped class due to a game release, but I probably have.

Hmm, the illusion never broke for me in Mass Effect either. I thought 2's focus on small character moments was especially great. Garrus' sidequest is still one of the most intense gaming experiences I've had. Never played 3 though, so maybe that's why.

Sometimes I enjoy it less, sometimes it doesn't matter. Depends on the story. But that doesn't change the fact that you're prioritizing external consequences over internal ones. Regardless of whether or not the outcome is the same, the decision about Lee's arm changes the story.

What about a book you've heard the ending to? Or historical fiction? I guess I can't argue with that sentiment, but I also can't understand it.

The game only seems nihilistic if you only judge choices for the external consequences they bring about. It doesn't matter whether or not you protect Clem; what matters is that you try to protect Clem and how you make that attempt. For the arm, there are absolutely consequences: in one instance Lee tries to save himself by going through an intensely painful experience; in the other, he avoids that experience and decides to take the risk. Just because there isn't a crazy branching tree doesn't mean the choices don't matter. As an analogy, I chose yesterday to hang out with some friends instead of coming home and getting work done. Over the next couple of days, that will probably affect my schedule slightly. By next week the consequences will be lost in a haze of other decisions I've made. But the choice still mattered: yesterday was vastly different because of that choice than it would have otherwise been. To put it more simply, The Walking Dead is about the effects of choices in the present, not their effects in the future.

Portal was going to be my suggestion, but lacking that I'll say Journey. Likewise, simply a perfect game. If you want something to pair it with, go with WarioWare Inc: Mega Microgame$ on the GBA, to show the breadth of things that video games can accomplish.

There's no need at all to play Ocarina before Majora's Mask. My brother and I played Majora first when we were kids. Ocarina has also felt like the alternate-dimension version of Majora to me.

Huh, why did I think that time froze in the dungeons?

Time doesn't move while you're in a temple. There's no need to feel stressed while you're inside them.

Because Skull Boy steals his ocarina. That's the hook for the whole prologue.

As mentioned, you can turn back time in The Last Express (it be be very easy to get into an unwinnable state otherwise). As to your second point, the whole point is that there's no permanence. Everything resets. This accomplishes several things: like I said above, it let's you see different people's schedules at different points, contributing the sense of a world moving without you; you see everybody do the exact same things in the same order, like clockwork, mechanically expressing the game's primary theme of inevitability; you see what will happen to everybody in the town should you fail to complete your quest; you see the effects your actions have on townspeople; and, perhaps most importantly, while the rewind mechanic allows to complete all the sidequests and make everybody happy, it's impossible to do all that in a single cycle, meaning that in the final, "canonical" cycle, some people will be left with their problems left unsolved, which is really interesting in a game that is about solving people's problems. Majora's Mask doesn't work at all as a game if you don't have the 3-day cycle and the ability to reset it. You could maybe design around the holes that removing those mechanics would leave, but at that point you would be making a different game altogether.

Epona is in the game. While we're on Majora's Mask talk, I want to point out how awesome the music is, particularly the Clock Town theme. It's among the game themes that have the most iconic resonance for me, probably because you here it so much. I never realized until today that it changes to become faster and more discordant as the days progress. That evolution perfectly captures the game's tone for me.

The mechanical importance of the 3 day-limit is that it allows the inhabitants of Termina to feel like real people with lives outside of Link's feud with the Skullboy. Everybody has a schedule that they stick to; they have goals and desires that you can learn about; they have regrets that you can soothe. That doesn't work if you don't limit the time frame that you have to schedule, both from the perspective of processing power and feature creep. You can't schedule people's days when there's no limit on them, so you limit them. But you want the player to be able to see everything, so you give them the ability to go back. The Last Express does the exact same thing. It's taking the concept behind Warren Spector's "one city-block" idea and applying it to time instead of space. I don't fault anyone for not liking it, but it definitely serves a mechanical purpose.

I would love to do this!

Wait for 10 000. She just wants to make a good entrance.

I don't have much to add to this conversation, other than that I find it interesting that the legalization movement has gained so much steam in the States, while it seems to have stalled in Canada, even though I get the sense that Canadian society is in general far more accepting of marijuana. That might just be me coming from a very pot-friendly environment though (although not being a smoker myself). Anecdotally though, it seems that other people share the same feeling. I have a hard time imaging moral outrage at pot smoking here on the same level that I've seen it among Americans. Maybe that's why people aren't as anxious to legalize here, because there's not as much to fight back against? That might be complete bullshit though. I'm sleepy from reading for school.

There's still The Bay. That counts as a department store, right?

I really enjoyed the beginning of the game, thought it dragged a bit in the middle and then really enjoyed the end. So overall, I thought it was pretty great. I was disappointed with the items though. I think a Mega Man-style system would have been better. I am super excited for the DLC though.