clyde

Why write about Mountain? Edit: Because it is there.

So I don't really know what a "formalist game" is. I was thinking that it is a game where the distractions of objectives and agency are stripped away so that the polygons, sounds, and colors could be observed for what they are away from those dependencies. Does this mean that tech-demos are formalist games? When I see people discussing frame-rate and shaders, are they examining games through a formalist analysis?

A documentary that tries to figure out if gender differences are purely biological, cultural or a combination between the two.

I do think that if a larger audience was exposed to more non-objective applications that this attitude of "The person who made this is just trying to trick me" would dissipate. I would say that the most formalism I see applied to games is on Game Jolt. The expectations of that community are vastly different than the expectations of Steam-users. Of course, it's not an entirely fair comparison because people understand that Game Jolt content is usually work in process or "I'm done experimenting with this idea" and formalism is incredibly useful in analyzing unfinished work that promises little. But isn't this form of analysis much more likely in a community of people who are actually creating in the same media? Look at the comments given to this game for example. Right now, most self-identified gamers have very inflexible definitions of what a "game" is. And when that definition changes, it changes what they are identifying themselves with. So we have them trying to keep the meaning pure. Meanwhile many people who may be attracted to formalist games are turned off from games because they view them as highly competitive dexterity challenges or adolescent fantasy narratives. Both sides are divining a self-fulfilling prophesy which limits the medium to avoid any dissonance with something they see no need to question. Not-games, walking-simulators, and screen-savers are broadening those expectations. The goal isn't to make sure that everyone appreciates formalist games, the goal is to create enough tolerance where they can exist for themselves rather than as an antithesis.

I enjoyed this too because it takes the idea of a formalist approach into account (though doesn't seem to give it much effort) and still comes to the conclusion that Mountain is not for them. I enjoy reading about this struggle. http://ungaming.tumblr.com/post/91313343735/thoughts-on-why-i-am-unable-to-appreciate-mountain I thought they were saying that non-interactive form is part of the game.

Michael McMaster considers potential difficulties that we may face when thinking about Mountain. -via Chris Priestman https://medium.com/@michaeljmcmaster/on-formalism-a1b4e95bb435

On episode 44 of the Not A Game podcast, Pip admits to searching through baby-naming websites and taking Buzzfeed-style quizzes to determine a good name for her Wildstar-character. This is the stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace Now that is a wikipedia article! How is it that all this shit is connected? Is it because so few people had the resources to do interesting things in Victorian society? or because they were all reading the same three magazines? What a horrible family, but they ended up with a great character for a steampunk story. I'm having a hard time finding any of Flyology's illustrations online. Edit: Looks like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling wrote a steampunk book with her as a character. Cool.

In the show that the fanfic I'm reading is based on the characters each have a (like) poker-tell. They have these physical catch-phrases. I'm sure there is a name for this but I don't know what it is. She unthinkingly grasps him all the time and then looks at him with wide eyes and nods enthusiastically while he tells her to go away. She also has this serious persona she puts on on where flipping her hair away from her neck with her hand is used for punctuation. He tends to say something he thinks is clever and then looks at no one and talks to himself while smirking and it communicates very clearly that he is proud of himself. It's really effective when the fanfic makes use of these motions. I can picture them doing it and it makes the dialogues way more interesting when they reference those tells for shorthand. I like that a lot. Something else I noticed (and this could have more to do with reading a romance than with reading fanfic) is that when I brush up against my wife or get a chance to hold her by the shoulders for a moment while reaching for something on a shelf, I experience a tetris-effect from the fanfic that makes me feel like it's a really big deal. We've been together for a while and we are frequently physically affectionate. The young-love doubts expressed in the fanfic are not something we typically experience. But there have been some moments in the past few days where I am sincerely thinking "I can't believe I'm touching her right now."

I dreamt that I walked into a store-front that was mostly empty but with the plaster spatial divisions that you find in department stores. It was being used as some sort of think-tank club. I don't know if other parts of the country have this but in the southeast of the United States, there's this tendency for christian youth-evangelism to open hangout-spaces that resemble sparse, temporary looking, stripmall coffee-shops. It was one of those, but for philosophizing or academic curiousity. Anyway I sat in one of the chairs that didn't match any others and the leader of the discussion handed me a single sheet of paper and finished what they were saying about what they thought of "Muerdin's"? theory on fan fiction. Then he told me it was my turn. I can't read well in dreams so I gave up trying and just decided to tell them about how I had been participating in a discussion in the fan fiction thread on the Idle Forums. One of y'all must have been represented by one of the other few people in the room because they kinda gave the name-drop a nod. I knew who it was in the dream, but now I think it was some blend of my made-up mental images of El Muerte, Bjorn, and Gormongous. I talked for like two minutes about why I thought the subject was interesting. The only part I remember is what I was trying to say once the host became bored and was not-so politely trying to give someone else a chance to speak. I was trying to tell them that I really enjoy how every branch in a story gets filled out by a niche of a niche. This turned into a party at my friend's house where I only knew my wife, my friend and her husband and didn't really want to meet anyone else. When I got refills of my beverage it was on some sort of hydrophobic pillow that spilled easily.

Thanks. Got to the point where I could make a single tone, but when I needed to make multiple to tones simultaneously, I realized that this was going to be an uphill battle the entire way so now I'm just using a .wav of a sine. I'm still going to look at the link you posted though, I might end up experimenting with it more eventually.

I liked both games. I certainly enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins more, but they are both great games IMO. I wouldn't not play Dragon Age 2 just because I didn't like the mechanical demands of Dragon Age: Origins. Maybe by playing Dragon Age 2 Mington will decide that it's worth dealing with the complexity of Origins so they can find out what is so great about this "Hero of Ferelden" they keep hearing about.

If only they each had varying accents.

It sounds like you may want to skip Origins and go straight into Dragon Age 2. They streamlined the inventory and the skill tree combat so that you can play it like an action-RPG if you so desire. I played the game very cautiously by determining the actions of each party member, pausing and playing, navigating through the skill-set radial menus for every hit. Battles would take five to ten minutes. But I know someone who just put that shit on easy, stuck with one character and just played through like it was Golden Axe.

After reading that the Bronte family wrote fanfic about Lord Byron, I read his wikipedia article. What a colossal dick. His great uncle was a dick too. The Brontes can write whatever they want about him as far as I'm concerned. Hopefully it's about how much of a dick he was.

As I'm becoming more familiar with the terms, I'm realizing that one of my favorite korean dramas features a mary-sue lead. You Are Beautiful is about an orphan-girl who grows up in a convent and finds herself in a situation where she must pretend to be a boy in a boy-band to save her brother's career. She is incredibly self-sacrificing throughout the show which actually becomes an obstacle to the romance that eventually forms. Everyone loves her except a female star who is competing for the love-interest. It's really great. ----- So I was reading some of the fanfic about the actors in Master's Sun falling in love (just until filming ends). And there is this additional quality I noticed. In the first one I read, I thought the use of Gong Hyo Ji's break-up of a 10-year long relationship was kind of awkward. I didn't know anything about her personal life before reading the fanfic. I was like "Huh. Okay, I bet that her fans knew about this before Master's Sun started and it was probably an angle they played up to build the sense that there is a potential real-life relationship between the two leads." I can certainly understand what the purpose of that would be, given that I am reading fanfic about them hooking up. But now I'm reading this one and the suicide of one of So Ji Sub's best friends has become a emotional touchstone by which he measures Gong Hyo Jin's personality; she reminds So Ji Sub of him and he wonders if he can handle that. I looked it up and indeed, the suicide is real and there are a bunch of pictures of So Ji Sub in grief during that event. I'm conflicted because I view the use of a very personal, real-life trauma for a fictional work to be in poor taste just as a general rule; but I have to admit that it's used for something interesting here. It's probably not my place to chose what is "interesting enough" for acceptable use of a personal tragedy, but if the reasoning for the suicide was depicted (for instance if the fanfic stated that his best friend committed suicide because So Ji Sub scorned his love) instead of the effects of it on So Ji Sub, I would find it vulgar*. This inner debate about whether or not I think this is poor form, got me wondering if there is a subset of fanfic about non-fictional people (and all the baggage that that would include). Indeed there is: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_person_fiction * actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I would find a description of his grief as insincere and for show as rather distasteful. Also also: tegan, I just have to express my appreciation for this line from the fanfic you linked.

Or unplug the treadmill and watch as hilarity ensues.

So far, the 13-page fanfic I read for free on tumblr is way better than the 136 page one I paid for. The premises are exactly the same, but the longer one just hasn't intrigued me. One thing I love about the experience of reading both of them is that they both make mention of the hideous plaid, tweed dress that the main character wears in on or two episodes of the show. When I've watched the show in the past I've always been stunned by the fact that anyone would make that dress, much less put it on a main character in a drama as if it was a reasonable thing for someone to wear. I like seeing that other fans noticed that dress, though neither of them have mentioned my thoughts of how horrible it must have been to have that fabric touching her skin. Its enjoyable to see other people noticed the same things.

Everyone has an accent. There is no standard accent.

Episode 43 of the Not A Game Podcast has the most interesting discussion of Watch Dogs I've heard. Mostly the stuff about how much fun it is to observe other people playing an open-world sandbox-game without them knowing that another player is watching them through an avatar. They don't go incredibly deep into the concept, but I can totally see how having this experience while maintaining the agency that the game usually provides through controlling your own avatar, would be significantly different than spectating, competing, or cooperating.

I might have misunderstood what you were trying to say. I thought that you were saying that the ability for fanfic writers to profit from IPs they don't own, hurts the original authors. I've never heard of LJ Smith until your post, but looking into it a bit it seems that she is a great example of why fanfic needs to remain potentially profitable for the authors of derivative works. She didn't own the characters or the story, it was commisioned work. So when the company tries to rip something she has invested so heavily in away from her, it's important that she be able to continue using the world she created in her ongoing creative efforts. She is doing so by writing fanfic. http://www.ljanesmith.net/blog/2014/635-l-j-smith-s-new-vampires-diaries-series

This makes me want to write a cyberpunk short-story about an agency that garnishes wages as they enumerate through the private property that a person has self-identified with. "Our records show that you quoted this movie to your friends in conversation. So that's $1.03" "What? But how did I take profits away from you?" "You made them laugh and spoiled the ending Mr. Stime. That means they didn't have to rent the movie from one of our officially approved servers." When I lived in Athens, GA there was some agency that went around trying to get restuarants and book-stores to pay licensing fees for playing the radio or cds. I don't see creators as owners of ideas. From my perspective, when a creator distributes an idea or concept they have relenquished control. Its ours now. You don't get to throw trojan horses into the public dialogue and then tax everything that grows from it. I think it comes from this fantasy that if a person just comes up with one good idea, they can just put their legs up and watch the money come in for the rest of their lives. Nope. This expectation grows patent-trolls, not more culture. The problem here is that LJ Smith can't write (what is now) fanfic of her own creation for profit, not that she got fired from commissioned work.

It is subtitled, but here is the link to watch it if you and your wife are feeling especially ambitious one evening. http://www.viki.com/videos/1008739v-masters-sun-episode-1 I watch these with my wife and we freak the fuck out when the romantic tension gets too high. Its good fun. I hear you though, subtitles are a huge barrier to hurdle.

This is interesting because I would really appreciate an explanation of why they made different choices. The exception to this is when the developer didn't really listen to what was said and responds to feedback as if it were similar feedback that they've heard before or if they are just being dismissive. As long as I get a sense that they are listening to the criticism, I enjoy hearing detailed responses.

I'm a protean fellow. My interest in Korean rom-coms has established itself over the last few years. Korean pop-culture has a high amount of interconnectedness. So the pop-stars are often in the dramas; the actors go on musical tours even though they lack the ability to sing in tune, that type of stuff. So because I watch k-pop music videos and consume rom-coms when they aren't terrible, I have been aware that there is a fanfic element as a bystander. In You Are Beautiful for instance, the show is about a boy-band. Three members of the cast are actually in separate bands. In one scene, Jeremy is reading fanfic about the fictional band he is in in the show. Those references mix with the release-news that includes tid-bits like rumored plans of fans to "black-ocean" an EXO concert because one of the members has been revealed to date a Girl's Generation member. So I knew that fandom was a well-worn aspect of a thing I already enjoy, but I've never really made an effort to explore it. The recent discussion of fanfic as a media in the Feminism-thread and recent podcast discussiom has reminded me that I like the idea of fanfic. This reminder points out to me that I am not getting the portion of fandom that I'm aware of on my periphery. I usually walk into things which other people are vocally passionate about (if they look fun and loving) with the assumption that there is an potential appreciation that I am missing out on. When I try them out, it doesn't always hook. Point & Click adventure-games, anime, and action-movies come to mind. But I think that I've already invested a lot in Hallyu, so I was more likely to attach than to not. I would love to know what Bjorn's reaction to watching 16 episodes of Master's Sun, and then reading the fanfic I read today, would be. But obviously that would be a huge investment for anyone. I often wonder about what creates affinity, having a control-experiment to compate and contrast with would be interesting. Seriously though. I'm looking forward to reading more of this stuff. It can't all be as good as the one I read today, I might just be riding high on a lucky find.