tberton

I watched like 10 minutes of the Giant Bomb Quick Look and am totally sold on this game, if I wasn't already. I can already see how complex the puzzles will get. Plus, this is Journey levels of beautiful.

There's a really good interview with Jonathon Blow by Austin Walker on Giant Bomb, if anybody wants to hear his thoughts on the game.

Somebody just made that as a "What is Firewatch?" joke, right? No way that's real.

Like other's said, don't worry too much. I built a PC last month and it was super easy. The most stressful part was picking the components - actually putting everything together was fairly painless.

Does anyone know how to comment on Giant Bomb articles? I'm logged in and everything, but I can't for the life of me find a "Comment" button or text box.

I think some of Boom's stuff should satisfy this. John Allison's Giant Days is a pretty down to earth "first year at college" kind of story, from what I've heard. There's also Archie (I'm serious about that - one of the mainstays of American comics is completely down to earth.)

So, is this subforum intended entirely for video game development or are other types of games welcome as well? Because while a couple of my game ideas are for video games, I'm mostly interested in tabletop game design (board games, card games, RPGs, etc.). Is anybody else here interested in that stuff? Unfortunately, since I'm in school right now I don't really have any time to commit to my ideas, but I'd still love to know if there's anybody else here who shares my interest or has any experience with this type of game development.

John Hodgman is a professional comedian, though.

I keep meaning to read that. I loved his previous book, The Sisters Brothers.

Instead of working on any of my original designs, I decided to write an essay about how I'd redesign Monopoly. If nothing else, it was a good thought experiment to work through how to change an existing design while keeping its core intact.

I think it's mostly a "not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" situation. You can't account for every way a player might cheat, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to account for any of them. Also, it's really easy to accidentally give out information in slight phrasing, so it's a good idea to get everybody on the same page. My Mom has started playing Bridge over the past couple years and it's been really interesting to watch her and learn a bit about the game myself. I think I might write into the pod about it.

I'm going to say that this is because I started playing again. It's exciting though! And I agree: I'm not interested at all in the "expand the map" DLC, but deepening the council and diplomacy mechanics seems awesome.

About to start off a new game of this, but I was wondering: Has anybody tried the Game of Thrones mod? Is it worth it?

Does he really hate those games? I recall several times everybody said that every game on the list was great, they were just nitpicking about the order. He dug into Mario Maker a bit, but he also praised the level creation tools a bunch. Has he insulted Splatoon elsewhere? All I noticed on the GOTY casts was that he said that other games should go higher than it on the list.

If we`re talking about classics that we'd like to revisit or get around to, I'd love to hear Chris and Sarah talk about Catch-22, one of my favourite books ever. I feel like it's a good example of "heard of, but never read" because it's so weird and labyrinthine and uninviting. But it's also a really good examination of the insanity of war and it's easily the funniest book I've ever read. Virginia Woolf, I think, would be a good one, since her novels benefit a lot from discussion. Any of her main three (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves) would probably fit.

They also both do that thing where the main character knows more about a plan or conspiracy than they let on to the reader.

If you enjoy the political machinations and intrigue of Mantel's books, I'd recommend Jean le Carre. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and Smiley's People are all fantastic.

Hey guys, great episode! Comeback mechanics and runaway leaders are some of my favourite game design ideas to think about, so this conversation got my brain spinning a lot. First, some examples of things you guys were talking about: I'm surprised that nobody brought up Dominion when talking about games that try to slow down winners. I don't love Dominion, but I think it's got one of the most elegant solutions to this issue. In Dominion, you use a deck of cards to purchase more cards that enter your deck and make it more efficient. Then you leverage that efficiency to buy victory point cards to win the game. Except those victory points also enter your deck and do nothing, reducing your efficiency. To make a play at victory, you need to weaken yourself. It's exactly analogous to weighing down a racecar, except in this case the mere act of making the car go fast weighs it down automatically. It's a really brilliant system. David was asking about games that encourage a player to stay in a close second, like in Formula 1. The best example I can think of is one of my favourites, Tammany Hall. The game is about municipal elections and is split into four terms. Each term, players set-up for the elections that will happen across the city at the end of the term. Once the election happens, players gain 1 point for each ward they won. The player who won the most wards becomes the Mayor and gets three extra points. However, the Mayor also has to hand out City Offices to the other players, which makes them stronger during the next term and makes it difficult for the Mayor to hold onto their position. What this means is that, during every election, you either want to win the Mayoralty by such a wide margin that your opponents won't be able to pull you down, or you want to come in second by the slimmest of margins, still holding onto a lot of wards while also getting a City Office. While this might seem strange in other games, it works really well in Tammany Hall because it evokes the feeling of playing politics and understanding that the person in the spotlight isn't always the person in power. Now, some more ideas about how to implement comeback mechanics and limit runway leaders: One thing you guys touched on slightly but that I think deserves closer discussion is that a good way to keep every player in a game throughout it's duration is to limit the degree to which past performance limits or expands future performance. I think baseball is a really good example of this, both on the macro and micro levels. There's a saying that, in baseball, momentum is only as good as tomorrow's starting pitcher. What this means is that it doesn't matter who won yesterday - each game is it's own self-contained possibility space. Even if the 1927 Yankees were the best team ever, the fact that they keep winning didn't make it more likely that they would continue to do so, outside the fact that it was indicative of the skill of the players. Winning one game didn't make the next team the had to play worse; it didn't mean they started with more runs or had to record more outs. Likewise, each play in a baseball game is only slightly related to the plays before and after it. Of course, whether a pitcher is behind or ahead in the count matters for the batter's prospects and getting runners on base is better for the offense. But once the at-bat is over, everything's reset and the pitcher and batter face each other on even ground; once an inning is over, everything switches and the previous inning may as well not have happened. There's nothing about baseball that gives the losing team an advantage, but still no lead is insurmountable. In digital and tabletop games, a lot of this can be accomplished with randomness. If you're rolling an unmodified die, the odds don't care about whose winning or losing. Of course, there's sweet spot you want to hit, but I think it's important not to ignore the role randomness can play in ensuring that players stay engaged in a game. If I know I'm only a few good rolls away from being back in the thick of it, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure those rolls go my way. And even without randomness, a designer who wanted to reduce the need for a comeback mechanic could make sure that the game was more about performing many discreet actions well than it was about performing a series of actions that link together to have a bigger effect. Another way to reduce the need for comeback mechanics, or to remove the sting of comebacks that feel unsatisfying, is to concentrate more on the value of "playing to play" rather than "playing to win." I think far too many strategy games and players in both the digital and tabletop spaces have tunnel vision about victory and it seriously limits design possibilities. If one of the goals of comeback mechanics is to ensure that a players remain engaged even if they are winning, maybe the answer is instead to remove winning as the sole reason to remain engaged. There's no need for a comeback if winning is secondary to the enjoyment of each particular moment of play. Zacny touched a bit on this when he talked about the successes of Paradox Games. Conversely, when the two Robs were talking about their War of the Ring came, they said it was unsatisfying because it meant that the previous two hours were meaningless. Presumably, this is because it meant that the decisions made in those hours didn't significantly contribute to who won. But why should the meaning of a decision in a game be entirely linked to it's effect on victory? Why can't those moments be meaningful on their own? Legacy games do a really good job of bypassing this, I think. When I play Risk Legacy, I'm trying to win the game, sure. But if I don't win or if I feel that whoever won did so because of happenstance, that doesn't make it feel hollow. There are other things to get excited about in that game: what packets were opened up, which territories were changed, who staged an impossible defense, who unexpectedly broke an alliance, what the next game is going to look like. "Who won and did they deserve it?" is a far less interesting question than any of those. I have more thoughts, but that's probably enough for now.

I thought it was funny that Nick described Ancestry.com as a game, because I'm planning on writing a paper next semester about the reverse: how a certain type of game is really good at recreating the feeling of archival research.

I think what makes that game work is that the items you get are all really interesting. Metroidvania's live mostly on the quality of the level design and the quality of the items/abilities and while you're right that Shantae's level design is only alright, the items are great.

Double-post just to say that I'm not sure this complaint is quite fair, insofar that the original Toy Story gets pretty dark and dramatic in a lot of ways too (the whole sequence at Sid's place, mainly). I agree that Toy Story 3's tone varies really wildly, though, which is why I don't like it as much as the first two.

Oh man, really? Finding Nemo might be my favourite. Although that's probably still the first Toy Story. I think my ratings would probably go: 1. Toy Story 2. Finding Nemo 3. Toy Story 2

Euro-American, Euro-Canadian and Anglo-Canadian are actually all terms used pretty commonly in colonial histories of North America, at least in my experiences. English (or Anglo) Canadian is still a commonly used term, differentiated from French Canadian. Not an expert, but I imagine the same way that belonging to many other communities works: recognition by the community, either informally through personal ties or formally through legal ones. Obviously, those formal ties are pretty fraught when they are determined by colonial states and not First Nations themselves. But yeah, in the limited reading I've done on the topic, belonging and citizenship are hugely complicated and important issues within First Nations, especially when many of the methods for determining them (blood quantum, marital status and voting, notably) have been imposed from the outside.

Excited to listen to this! Dien is an awesome guy, so happy that he was able to make it to the Top 16.

Hmmm? There's plenty of continuity. The Avengers pulls directly from Thor and Captain America, Iron Man 3 pulls from Avengers, Agents of SHIELD had plenty of stuff going on concurrently with Captain America 2, etc.