clyde

Ouch. I have the dlc, live on the eastcoast of the United States and have been able to get into games consistently as of yesterday. Usually it tries for about 1 minute, then it seems to switch servers and I get into games very quickly from that point on.

Even though it can be awkward, I recommend Storium (once it is released) for writers in your situation. I find that people waiting for my turn and expecting me to stay true to the world encourages me to write fiction frequently and within limits. The card system quickly becomes trite, but it takes care of the nothing-to-say problem. The textual results aren't always amazing, but I feel that I have much more developed ideas for when I actually go to creating my own cyberpunk story. I think Merus mentioned that there are story-telling forums of some sort that can accomplish the same, but I'm not familiar with them.

So I guess fan-art could be something that keeps the knife sharp until the artist has something to express that is better communicated with unique content. I do something very similar; I draw seussian buildings and animals by default. Then when I have something idiosyncratic to express, I already have the page open and the pen to it. Edit: Ok, I think I'm closer to figuring out what I'm trying to say. The reason that fan-art or religious art might have diminished value for some could be generalized as lacking what is needed for receptivity in the consumer. I think this occurs when people involuntarily dismiss content because they assume that they have already learned its lesson; someone sees a painting of a Disney character and once put into that category, they may say "O.K. it's just one of those, I've seen those." But I think many of us have probably had the experience where some piece of art that we pass by all the time because we think we know enough about it (this dismissal is what I mean by lacking the potential for receptivity in the consumer) is transformed with new context (which has increased the potential receptivity). Some examples: Yeah, I've seen it before, kinda over-rated. My receptivity of this piece is low. But then! due to my routine paths on the internet, due to the channels I am tuned to I read this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/03/mona-lisa-3d_n_5256193.html and suddenly I'm inspired. Another example: I'm like, "yeah, Jesus, what?", but then I heard an iconoclast's view of the portrait and its history and I became receptive to the art again. I'm having a hard time finding a link to the video though. Basically the idea is that some people are really upset about this portrait because they believe it's a false idol and their religious book has a thing against false idols, especially when they are supposed representatives of their own god. EDIT: I found something that is close enough. I love that this picture is possibly the most successful piece of fan-art ever created. Now everytime I see this portrait, I think of iconoclasm (which is cool). What I'm suggesting is that we all have fairly consistent (but different between individuals) channels of information and that they fill with content somewhat effortlessly. Good curation can lead to more interesting content, but it will fill either way. When I was a kid, I didn't have cable television. That doesn't mean that I don't think about music-videos (no MTV), but it does mean that my references of pop-art are heavily influenced by westerns from the 70's and prime-time network sitcoms from the early 90's. So Grizzly Bear doesn't get paid. I'd be watching reruns if they weren't around. The emphasis is on the channel of distribution, that's who gets paid not the content creators. I'm so close to making sense. Our culture values the channels of distribution instead of the content so the destiny of art-creation isn't a matter of filling up an infinite area with all the potentials, it's a matter of creating circumstances where receptivity is high.

For me it had a Kurt & Courtney feel by the end, which was an odd juxtaposition considering how real those people were and how serious the situation is. It simultaneously felt like a re-dramatization and an VICE documentary. Maybe this surreality is partially due to the idea that everyone in that world believes that they are legitimate business-men and poiticians while that belief is side-by-side with the absurd charicature of the narrator.

This is what Far Cry 3 should have been like: It's on Netflix. Dude buys a diplomatic position so he can smuggle diamonds. It's crazy.

I suspect that making fan-art and depicting unique subjects may not share as many skill-sets as you would think. I think that the two differ drastically on what the impetus is for creating them and (as is the case with accomplishing anything) the incentives often determine whether or not anything is made at all. If I thought that my time would be better spent refining a drawing I made for hours rather than doodling on a fresh page, instead of refining the piece, I would probably end up sleeping or watching korean rom-coms. After reading your post though, I wonder if something about our circumstances encourages fan-art more than unique subjects. Maybe the huge flow of hobbyist content is completely dependent on massive consumption of art through narrow channels.

If you don't experience any problems with a different browser, I'd check for ad-ware. I had web-videos crashing my computer in Chrome and removing ad-ware took care of it.

I'm starting to think about how much of a luxury it is to live in circumstances where art can be made without explicit use, value, objective, or sponsorship; and for chocolate in which to dip our diamonds during our zepplin parties, those fan-fiction collages are distributed through an infrastructure which is effectively owned by the commons. Looking around on deviantart, warpdoor, youtube, or soundcloud, I don't see people waiting for their break; I see an explosion of art whose value is more often determined by the tidal flood of its ilk than its level of craft. This is fucking amazing. Can you remember what it was like for the Church of the Subgenius or Devo to be the weirdest things you've ever seen?! For a long time I've been thinking of art (in some mystic ideology) as some sort of akashic record that fills its shelves over the span of time. But as I use more digital tools, the content I'm exposed to tends to appear as a steady stream rather than an ordered collection. I used to think that art was largely dependent on technical breakthroughs, and now I suspect that it's mostly a matter of exposure. What stream of content was I in when I needed inspiration? What routine of internet sites was I checking everyday when I felt depressed and needed a reason to get out of bed. This is a new way of thinking about consumption of art for me, so my description here is ambigious; overtime it will focus and refine. I'm sharing it here because I think that it is an essential part of what the value of content creation is to our culture. If Grizzly Bear's members get sick and no longer make albums, then we will just listen to something else. There is no shortage. We live in such a luxurious infrastructure that content-creation is inevitable. You can start to see this happen in computer-games. Sony, Xbox, Nintendo, Steam, and the front page of the app-store are the equivalent of radio-stations before ClearChannel bought them all. Curation sites like Warpdoor and FreeIndieGam.es are pretty much college-radio and Twitter is the CMJ. We can't play all the games, so we choose channels that funnel the selection because what we really want is to be able to identify through the art we consume by comparing and contrasting our individual experiences. I think that's the reason some people on Steam get upset about not-games and Greenlight; the syllabus is threatened and the shared experience is no longer possible through the funnel they've been using. Cory Banks on Gamers with Jobs talks about how there are too many Kickstarters. It's obvious that he values the ability to play everything that is being discussed, and that he sees that ability being threatened. I think this is a really interesting and helpful way to look at art-consumption in our culture. The distribution and incentivization aspects begin to make more sense. It's similar to the difference between thinking that cats are territorial in terms of area and then finding out that they are territorial in terms of paths and schedules instead.

That first article has done a better job of reminding me of my priorities as an artist than a few years of deliberation and lacking confidence. It's interesting to realize that an artistic lifestyle is just a temporary fragility that will die as soon as it is touched by anything. Being in a circumstance where you can focus on non-economically viable craft is truly a rare priviledge. Which would I rather have, a chance to record Gerroa Songs or health-insurance? It depends on whether or not I've ever gotten really sick or significantly injured.

A lot of the discussion about what we want from artificial intelligence has been about the decisions the bots make when they fight you, but I also find the potential of how they react in non-combat scenarios fascinating. I'm the the player who plays stealthily just so I can find out what the inhabitants of a cave in Skyrim are doing when they supposedly don't know that an adventurer has wandered in. I love watching Skyrim's village NPCs have their awkward exquisite-corpse conversations. I remember well enough, what playing computer-games was like before I understood that A.I. typically is just a short list of conditional states in games. I used to think that all the bots were actually acting based off of their past experiences and hypothesizing about how best to accomplish their goals. That's an illusion that I seek out in games. I don't know how Civ 5's A.I. works, but I like to think they they hold grudges and will pander to you with a future back-stab in mind. In some cases, I like thinking that some of the leaders value trade over territory gain and build intentional relationships with other non-player leaders with those plans in mind. If this is a case, it's not a learning behavior as much as it is having a few baked-in strategies and goals within a system where they consider history or memory. The game I want to play is were the bots actually learn and adapt to each other's strategies so that I can watch it occur and manipulate their relationships. The best example I've seen of this is an iphone game not coincidentally named Artificial Life. In it, you have hundreds of paramecium-bots exchanging behaviors by mixing the conditions and methods into their children when mating. Over time, the larger populations can be seen learning as individual members with sucessful strategies are more likely to procreate. Colonies form and the most exciting moments are when a highly developed colony first begins to come into contact with another that hasn't mixed for many generations. The biggest weakness of this not-game is that examining the reasoning in this genetic-algorithm A.I. is very difficult; you have to have been paying attention to the behaviors that were expressing themselves the most during various generations to gain an appreciation for why they are reacting to each other the way they are. Ideally, if this type of system was in a game like Skyrim, the player would be able to interrogate an NPC to follow their chain of reasoning. For fantasy-instance, you may see a milk-maid try to kill a shop-keeper. You could ask her "Why are you doing your current activity?" She responds with [These conditions were met]. You could ask "Why do you have [those conditions]?" ... and so on. I'd love to play that. Especially if I could negotiate giving them a new activity in exchange for completing their current goal. "I'll bring you food if you clear out that dungeon for me."

This is how I imagine driveatars.

If there isn't, there should be.

Has anyone played Tony Hawk's Pro-Dater? I've been thinking about it all day off and on. Nothing substantial, just thinking about it and getting slight elations.

Looks like Versu was wrested from its premature demise. http://versu.com/2014/06/06/news-about-versu-and-blood-laurels/ I'm relieved. I don't have an ipad and my single playthrough of "House on the Cliff" was somewhat disappointing, but I'm still really interested. The concept of dynamic simulations of characters in text-adventures is exciting to me. While "House on the Cliff" had awkward implimentation, where I think my bot-companions may have entered a panicked state that could not be calmed and the narration didn't seem to have enough content to provide me with a good explanation of the looping extremes, it was still a neat experience to be in a story with chat-bots whose behavior felt self-prioritizing and changing rather than pandering and cloistered. I was really disappointed when the project was canceled. I'm looking forward to getting to play more. I can imagine a future where I will somehow get an overpriced tablet.

Here is an interesting exploration of the wider game-development context in which Versu's ambition lies http://blog.adamatomic.com/post/88098035225/versu-plots-stories-languages-and-so-on

I was hoping for a choice a player makes rather than a situation authored by the game-designers. As I'm thinking about what a responsible game would say about cops and robbers, I'm realizing that the way the motives are presented would probably be important. In the case of Hardline, in my brief experience, it looked like the cops were willing to crash helicopters into buildings and light up the streets in order to secure five million dollars of cash for some evidence. The criminals looked like they were willing to race motorcycles up escalators, ride elevators in skyscrapers, shoot out windows and base-jump in order to grab money for more guns. Maybe two rival gangs would be a more appropriate theme. NPC cops that create problems for both sides would be neat.

Are there any games where false-flag missions are a mechanical option? The closest I can think of is starting proxy wars in Civilization 5 through diplomacy.

I'd love to participate in this discussion today (I'm working a doible and have a lot of time to kill), but my circumstances don't allow me to watch your video until this evening. So I'll only be responding to what you've written here. Cops, soldiers, gangsters, insurgents makes no difference to me. One thing that I do appreciate (not necessarily in this case) is when both sides are shown to have a mixture of just and unjust motives. I can imagine something that would look like thought-killing propaganda in a similar game-structure, but I don't really see one in Hardline from what I've played; maybe the assumption that the criminals and the cops have equal resources and fire-power is one. When I played the beta, one of my first thoughts was that this game would make more sense if placed in a mexican border town. This is based off of what I hear about the civil-war Mexico is experiencing currently, living in Appalachia with an internet connection. I think a good question would be "Would placing Battlefield Hardline in a Mexican border town help the victims of that war, or hurt them?" As far as desensitization goes, I think that games tap into our love of simple, achievable objectives that we can easily measure progress towards. My concern is when issues of public policy and personal relationships are submitted to this intoxicating optimization, not so much when games use themes of public policy and personal relationships. I would argue that people already have a disturbing tendency towards inconsiderate optimization in their decisions of how to treat others. My opinion is that games themed with the relationships of people actually help by showing how absurd the optimization-view is in its concentrated form. There are people playing who want to live out their fantasies of being a member of a righteous military poilce force, or a righteous criminal gang. And there are people whose views on police and criminals will be informed by this game. But in both cases, what is important to me is that when these people participate in public policy and personal relationships, that they don't think of it in terms of optimization. If the game has any responsibility to evoke this consciousness, then my suggestion would be to make sure to show that both sides of the conflict have heroism and villany. I would also include a mixture of motives that shows how in some cases, they both want the same things and in others they have mutually exclusive interests. I think I may have a hypocritical view. I preach against the propaganda of optimization, but I have my own agenda that I would like to forward through it. If pedestrians were included, and both teams were disincentived to have casualties accounted to their actions, the game could say some interesting things. Maybe one team could steal the weapons of the other team, dress as them and then mow down a group of innocents in order to lower the other team's score. The reason that including this type of thing is attractive to me is that it might expand a player's view of what the possible motives of the cops and robbers may be.

I was playing, but I found the game to be frustrating and inconvenient.

If I gain the power of reliable flight, I'm going to fly up really high and then fall for a long time before I swoop back into a downward trajectory. I think that will be incredibly fun. I'm surpirsed I don't see birds doing it like all the time.

This is today's sale on the Unity asset store. https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/17990 I wonder if it's aware of the current gender-model discussion.

I downloaded it on a relative's ipad during a holiday and tried to get in a play-through between family-time activities. It wasn't the most conducive situation for poking at the system enough to satisfyingly critique it. I'd love to see it on my android tablet or on pc, but I had given up all hope for it to even continue in development so I feel like wishing for more is pushing my luck.

It reminds me of the water in this terrain tool https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/18572 Here, go through the cave and you get to it where ther bridge is. http://www.qt-ent.com/PlayableDemos/Polyworld/PolyWorld6-5.html

Including vowels in file-extension abbreviations should be encouraged so I don't have to say all three letters. .doc is great .xml not so much .txt gets a free vowel because it's only missing one letter.

My apologies. Every once in a while I go through a bout of sarcasm, I always regret it.