clyde

I don't want you to take this as an attempt to convince you to play it, but I thought you might find my experience with The Binding of Isaac interesting.I too found it so repulsive that I had no interest in playing it for a long time. I was kind of annoyed at the zeitgeist for mentioning it so much because I wanted to play it so much, but the blood, puke, vomit, and flea-market satanism was too off-putting. Eventually I started to play it. I had thought that the aesthetic was meant for people who like horror movies, esoteric internet porn terms, and gore gifs (and it might be, I don't know), but I found that my disgust for the world actually added to my experience of playing it. I didn't want to weep on poop in the chance that I might find a penny, until I was low on hearts and I needed it. The aesthetic was so repulsive, that it made me question mechanical decisions, but the game puts you in such desperate positions that eventually the slight mechanical advantages win out. I started interpreting the meaning of The Binding of Isaac this way. It was about a child with so little, that his worth is measured in the negatives. His mother is trying to kill him, he is a prisoner in their basement who can do nothing but search for an exit. For me the game became about how desperation can deprioritize basic (reasonable) fears of disease, and simultaneously how desperation prioritizes superstition. I don't know if this was intentional, but I see the Binding of Isaac as one of the best examples of theme, aesthetic, and mechanics contributing to a greater-than-sum. It's still gross as shit though.

@Frentic Pony I love cyberpunk stuff. Regarding virtual reality versus deep reality: I'm fascinated by how our rationalizations and interpretations of reality will take form as persistent digital hallucinations that layer themselves on everything, and how different these will be. So for instance, a Libertarian will have bought the mind-apps that allow them to see the real truth and they will see buildings colored by how much tax-money that company recieves in subsidies. Or if you buy the Hot-Topic mind-app, everything will have AR spikes on it and you'll see heat-signatures of where Fall Out Boy sat on a bench. The different worlds we have due to different priorities will be far more convincing. In regards to death: My fear is that the galue of life will increase to an absurd level so that death is illegal. I can imagine a future where someone would have to go to Tom Cruise Minority Report lengths just to pull their own plug if they want it to end. This kinda mixes with the matrix part; maybe the singularity is when science creates the perfect bridge between digital circuits and brains? Then prisoners will get shorter sentences for mining bit-coin in their sleep. But that's just how it starts. Eventually brains would be farmed for capital. What else. I just heard about what Her is about. I'm looking forward to seeing that. It's a completely acceptable feeling in gamer-culture for someone to prefer playing against AI opponents rather than real people. I could see this bleeding into deep reality. Sometimes. I prefer the robot to the cashier at the grocery store. I like coffee shops where I can get my own refills rather than depending on a waiter. I can imagine a my facebook or twitter feed slowly filling with bots that look at my posts, talk about things ai find interesting, then use my response in order to determine which responses are more sucessful and mutate accordingly. Eventually, I don't even read my human friend's posts about how they dropped their toast that morning, I tend to pay more attention to Sasha Juniper (a 266th generation name given to a bot based on how long it took me to determine if I knew the previous versions sending me friend requests). She is also excited about how art-games and romantic comedy Korean dramas from the 2020's intersect. We discuss nuance in detail.

Anyone want to try playing music with me for the next few minutes? I'm just playing around so you don't have to be skilled or nothin. http://goo.gl/TmSIAd

It was mildly successful for those who were wondering. Keyboards are op, especially the synth that has glue on the keys.

I'm confused or just wrong or something. I must be coming at this from a very different angle. I understand that the objective of Mattingly is to persuade the public to trust him. But I'm paying attention to this story from a distance. I don't think I know anyone involved and I don't frequent Indie Statik either. For me, this story is a demonstration of a larger system of inequality and that's how the Kotaku story seems to also be treating it. What do you mean by "I think the objective is change or consideration of change"? What are you talking about changing? The reason I posted that statement is because I'm reading everyone's impression on whether or not the apology is satisfactory. Without determining any common objectives, we are all just talking to ourselves in public.

I really enjoyed this interview with Chan Marshall.

I think that there are a few things going on here. There is the actual personal instance of sexual-harassment between two real people; then there is the public discussion in which Mattingly is being made an example of and the larger social issue of patriarchy is being addressed. Those two things have different needs in order for justice to occur.

OH MY GOD you are hilarious. Ok, I came in for a different reason. I was thinking about getting it, but then when I read about it, I thought "This looks prime for boosting" which frustrates the hell out of me. So I went to the forums to see if it is a problems. It appears that it is, but not in the way I was imagining. I was thinking that someone would organize friends or create multiple accounts in order to just farm money; but the reality seems a bit more interesting. People are buying multiple copies of the game in order to use one account to scout the fortress and then another in order to actually rob it. I read a little and found this post by largestherb: To be fair, the post is from May 2013. I still have an interesting point. So if I'm reading this correctly, there was an event known to the general population as "the great laddering" when someone grieffed all of the houses that had an absurd quantity of trapdoors due to an imbalanced game. Not only that, but apparently design bugs were creating situations in which some of the fortresses became unsolvable, but remain as artifacts in the MMO world. "The temple" Edit: Oh wait, I DID read it incorrectly. Fuck it, my misreading made it way more interesting. I mean, sure; I don't want to play the game because of these types of problems, but once I accept that I'm not going to play it, I get kinda excited about how weird and magical this fictional space is becoming because of the dynamics between a design manifesting and a public gaming it. The idea that simple game-hacks open doors to new dimensions of these games, is fascinating to me. I am a bit of a purist when I play a game and I ignore any exploits I find, but I do have a appreciation for this tendency of sub-culture within a game to discover an entirely different way of playing it in which people that play the way the game was intended to be played are just... crops. I just don't want to be farmed.

We should figure out why public apologies are important and then determine whether or not this one meets our objectives.

I'd be willing to try it again.

Sorry everybody.

I usually just post things that recently catch my attention, but I was suddenly struck by the possibility that y'all might not know that Dirty Three exists. This is music. How do I find the emoticon of ejaculation? ?

Your link was broken for me http://kotaku.com/she-was-harassed-by-a-games-reporter-now-shes-speakin-1510714971 I learned some stuff from the comments.

After reading this thread, my confidence in what subtlety actually is has diminished. Are we talking about expressed permutation of detail?; the reproducibility of inference divided by the perceived effort of statement?; or what Hangdog suggests: the traces of attempting to describe the ineffable?

That Tone Control with Clint Hocking made me realize that working at a game development company is not for me. I have a fondness for things like eating and urinating.

I waited, but no one posted this. I'm tired of waiting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=TTrHwH2gEY8

I just wanted to mention that reading and participating in the discussion here about maiming and armor-reduction has had a noticeable effect on my capability to win in Factions.

Sorry I don't know which voice is Mark Morris and which voice is Chris Delay. I interpret the discussion they have around 7:00-9:25 as an enumeration of the systemic causes of the imbalanced violence, not systemic at the scope of how they have programmed the game personally, but systemic at the scope of how game-design in general has developed in such a way that violence is easier to express and therefore games are imbalanced towards it as a whole. I don't think they are using it as a justification for the game to represent prisoners as violent animals, I think it's an explanation of why this default occurs at an earlier stage of development. That is until one of them says dismissively that they are writing a game at 8:25. I think the other one is not so dismissive. They seem to understand the criticism of having drug-crimes under-represented from 13:20-17:30, but by the end of that part they become distracted by the goal of modeling addiction (which would be great). I wonder if they will consider having a more realistic representation of the ratio of offenses in the U.S. On a related note, I think the question of how they should balance the races of the prisoners is interesting. If they simply make 40% of the prisoners black, then that doesn't communicate that it comes from a pool (outside of the prison) of which they represent only 12%. -- I don't even understand Pedercini's argument about prison-labor, so I can't expect these guys to. -- I am disappointed around 26:15 where they seem to be saying that they don't want the option to lobby for longer sentences because that would be too sinister. My hope was that they would include the sinister options that the american prison system currently uses in order to express the systemic reasons why these choices are made by those invested in prisons. I'd take it farther and say that you should have relationships with politicians and media in prison architect, and those relationships should have consequences if you give your prisoners playstations (even if it is a low-cost method of increasing civility).

I wonder if the population will take it personally when they find out that they aren't as great as this fellow. Surely our boot-straps have a limited elasticity. http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1112696260/baxter-humanoid-robot-091912/

I love linguistic re-appropriation. It makes one realize that the cool kids are typically those referred to with pejoratives. I'm psyched about being a hipster because it's just our time's version of beats.

I don't want to ban it, but I am less likely to buy a game if I have to press a button to walk. It's not the walking that drives me crazy, I do that in Banner Saga, but it's automatic. And it's not the traversal, SSX consists of nothing more than a fun way to get from one place to another and a fun place to do it. Pressing a button to walk is a trope that needs to be questioned. Some games that provide excellent alternatives: SSX, Tony Hawk, Legend of Fae (which solves the problem the opposite way by making walking ridiculously deliberate), visual novels.

This is a good solution. Demonstrative examples: the pharmacy in The Walking Dead, Super Mario games where you hit one of those timed coin-buttons, I know there are bonus-levels like this, but I can't think of them. Also, I've heard that Zombi-U does this by making it so that time doesn't stop when you are scavenging through inventories.

The county ordinance is that trash is to be bagged. They don't specify what material the bags are made of, and that ordinance is rarely enforced.

Somewhat related to this and the Candy Crush Saga: I'm going to be pissed if I have to fight in order to say that my game is in a cyberpunk universe because of Cyberpunk 2077. I work slow.