tberton

I don't know, I thought that article was fantastic. I see what you're saying about the conciliatory tone, but a) I don't think it's actually that conciliatory (at least, the people she's addressing probably would find it more damning than conciliatory) and you kind of have to take on that tone when you're directly responding to an article about how feeling attacked by a movement makes you unwilling to identify with it. Her goal is to make nerds who had shitty childhoods understand that those experiences don't cancel out structural privileges: to do that, she needs to recognize and legitimize those feelings. Not doing so wouldn't really advance the conversation. Furthermore, she doesn't really imply that a lack of reconciliation on the part of other feminist or anti-racist activists is what has made the conversation about nerd entitlement difficult up until now. Had she done that, I could see the problem with the tone. But she actually puts the onus for change on the entitled nerds (a group which, I think we should admit, many members of this board probably belonged to and sometimes still do - I know that the feelings addressed in the article are ones I've had many times).

Yeah, Thumbs Space Alert is going to be awesome.

Great cast, as usual. One correction though: Excalibur does not have the ability of the other Grail ice. You cannot reveal other ice when the Runner encounters it. It would be way too powerful if you could.

The one that annoys me most is the "woman who works here" question. "The woman who works here" is technically the correct construction, but only the most pedantic English speaker would look at you twice if you said "The woman that works here." It makes sense, everybody knows what you're talking about, "that" is allowed to refer to all sorts nouns. What other metric of "proper grammar" can you have other than "most people think it's right"?

13, jerkwads. Although I really don't know how I got 2 wrong. And a bunch of them were dumb questions anyway. So I'm with Merus: it's bullshit. I'm 13/15 bullshit.

Alright, here's my chance to join in this thread! First, to be a pedant: the verb is "connote" not "connotate." Second, I find the idea that that a word is "supposed to" connote a particular meaning suspect. The whole idea about connatation is that certain words gain certain meanings aside from their denotative definitions. Connotation, it seems to me, should be a purely descriptive phenomenon - a word connotes whatever it connotes. To illustrate my point, I think you'd find very few people today for whom "weird" has a specifically supernatural connotation. To me it just means "abnormal."

I don't see how "only possible in games" removes storytelling opportunity. Portal, Depression Quest, Journey, Cart Life - all offer fantastic stories that are really only possible in games. What do you mean by "video-gamey"? I take that to mean "uses tropes generally used by past games", and in that case, nobody on the podcast was really advocating for that.

While I understand what is meant by this, I still find it funny. "Greatest" doesn't really have any more definite meaning than "best".

I don't think I used to feel this way, but Depression Quest is the perfect example of a game I played once, never need to play again and will always be on my "Best Ever" list. I probably will play it again someday, but doing so won't really affect my enjoyment. However, I would say that "replayability" or whatever is more than just parallel to quality. I think of it kind of like a proportion. If I'm only going to enjoy something once, that one time had better be really great - especially when it's a game, since so much of the interesting things about games often come from trying different inputs through iteration. So, Depression Quest is a great game, because even though I only played it once, that one time was about as emotionally affecting as any other single creative work I've ever experienced. Conversely, none of my individual sessions of WarioWare have been particularly transcendental, but when taken as a sum over the last ten years, it's extremely impressive. Put differently, if I played WarioWare only once it wouldn't be very meaningful and if I played Depression Quest dozens of times it would either be overwhelming or desensitizing.

If I had to pick just one, I'd say Portal is the Best Game. I think it fits all the criteria given here: under Sean's paradigm, a funny, non-violent game that does a very good job of onboarding its mechanics is a good bet for an Ambassador game (not to mention that Valve gives it away all the time); for Chris', Portal does things that only games can do, both in terms of its puzzle solving and its narrative twists; for Jake's, while Portal is a discreet experience, it's so short and the base mechanics are so enjoyable that it lends itself really well to replays - I know I replayed it almost immediately after beating it the first time. However, I prefer picking lists, so here's my list of the six Best Games. Why six? It's the smallest number that can be expressed as the product of two unique primes. Also, I wanted to do five but couldn't narrow it down. Portal Pikmin Super Smash Bros. Melee Depression Quest WarioWare Inc: Mega Microgame$! Journey

I would say by picking out particularly good/influential seasons.

The thing about the Hatred situation, which has been mentioned elsewhere (Zoe Quinn discussed it on Twitter the other day), is that it's fine to be worried about the slippery slope, but the answer is not pressuring Valve to distribute Hatred, it's weakening Steam's stranglehold on PC gaming.

Relevant to this thread's interests: Zoe Quinn has created a tool to help people decide how to go about making their first game. It has what I'm sure would be an Idle Thumbs approved URL: http://sortingh.at/

My avatar obligates me to mention Clone High, the greatest contiguous 13 episodes of television comedy. I'll let the theme song explain itself.

Yeah, I was going to amend my post but decided to wait for a response. You're right that the changes I cited about sports are smaller, except for one: the players. Because of the physical nature of those games, different players have a drastic effect on them. Baseball is the example I'm most familiar with and it has a great case study: pitchers. Different pitchers require batters to approach the game in different ways. When new pitchers enter the game, or old pitchers change their styles, every other player has to react accordingly. Now, obviously new players in an eSport also change the game, but I'd argue that it's to a lesser extent, since every player is still limited by the actions the game allows, while a physical sport allows players the full motor abilities of their body. Additionally, I think physical sports also have more theatrical value than eSports, meaning that continuous variety isn't as necessary. If you're into baseball, it's exciting every time Justin Verlander strikes somebody out, even if it looks the same every time. I don't think eSports plays have quite that same staying power, because the skill required to pull them off isn't as obvious, nor is it as easy to see the strain and excitement of the players, since they are abstracted by their on-screen avatars and even if you can see their faces, their more disconnected from the action than an athlete is.

I think the underlying point is that you need some axis of variety in a game like this if you want to keep it alive. DOTA's map doesn't change, but unless I'm very mistaken, it's constantly getting new Lords or changing old ones, right? In a game like Starcraft, where the designers made a conscious effort not to change the units very often, maps need to have more variety. Physical sports have variety too. First of all, the players are constantly changing and the more physical a game, the bigger a difference a new body will have on how its played. Equipment, arenas, weather - these all change too and keep the game interesting.

The Swapper is so good.

I think you mean "Babywall the Horse Armor". Although Babywall and the Horse Armor sounds like a pretty hilarious Nickelodeon cartoon.

I just remembered that FTL: Advanced Edition came out this year. That definitely makes it on my list, considering I put as much time into it as I did the original.

Given that this was missing three fifths of the "regular" cast, it was pretty great! Jake, Danielle and Patrick should start their own podcast: Ninten-is as Nintendoes.

What days were those? AC2 came out 2 years after the first game.

I don't know, saying that hiring an editor will improve you writing is true whether you're fan fiction writer or Ernest Hemingway. Another eye is always good.

On the topic of video game detective games: this looks pretty interesting.

I quite enjoyed this, although something I think it doesn't really convey well until the end: the point of the simulation isn't to show how people segregate themselves, it's that small biases lead to big biases, that those biases have lasting effects even after they've been eliminated and that biases in the opposite direction are needed to correct those lasting effects. It's visualized as "neighbourhoods" (and the research comes from segregation studies) but it's meant to apply more broadly than that.

Couple questions: is the license from the show or the books? Does it follow an established storyline, or carve out its own space?