clyde

I came in recently, but I sure do appreciate you all being here. I'm losing my passion because I have a place to vent where people know what the fuck I'm talking about (though not necessarily agreeing with it). Before I was just walking around the internet, righteously upset that no one gets games.

I'm so glad that I'm playing this during winter. The cold and the frost that I experience between game sessions adds to the tone.

As weird as this is, sometimes I fantasize about canceling my phone and internet for a little while. Some of my favorite experiences were had when I only had access to information I could walk to.

It's nice to know that you might last a few more years and that you may be able to walk uphill at some point in the near future.

This thread is intended as a catch-all for questions involving whether or not there is a game where [the feature you are looking for]. I'll begin:

That totally counts. It seems that I won't have any of these questions if I play all the games that have Phoenix Wright in them.

It's not quite sentience, but I've seen families of flagellates develop survival-strategies in Artificial Life that make me say to my iphone screen "Well aren't you little guys impressive, how clever!" And that has made me question how much of my behavior is me. So I guess I gave up some of my sentience in order to ascribe it to genetic-algorithms.

Is there a game where speech-bubbles have collision with things in the world? I'm imagining pressing "A" to talk to someone and a bird flying into the resulting speech-bubble.

I spoke too soon, that mechanic was just introduced. I'm really enjoying the game. One thing that bugs me is that the writing is lacking clarity. Maybe I'm used to very specific rules from visual-novels that I've been taking for granted. I tend to get confused about who is speaking, who I am making choices for and sometimes what my choices actually are.

I just reaches chapter three and I can't tell if I should increase the difficulty. I've had a couple of battles where one of my party members falls, but I don't see how that negatively affects my chances of further success. I wonder if I should be having a harder time.

WHEW! Reading the comments section on Polygon's choice for GOTY is mentally and emotionally exhausting. Congratulations on all the GOTYs, well deserved.

Some-times I miss parts of the story because I'm too busy taking screen-shots for my desk-top back-ground.

I assume that there would be a laugh-track. I wouldn't watch it, but I kinda want it to happen Fraggle Rock style.

After reading the scratchware manifesto for the first time and then looking around for writings by Greg Costikyan (who doesn't have a twitter account), I started trying to find out what Patrick Dugan is currently working on. His homepage has turned into a spam-blog about the prices of KIa vehicles and after a tweet in July about how his Facebook account got hacked, his twitter account seems to have an unhealthy interest in bit-coin. This was the first time I realized that when you die on the internet, the spam-bot mycelium grows over your avatars to return it to the cyber.

I think it may be a form of tomato surprise. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TomatoSurprise

I think the possible point of dissonant mechanics may be that they encourage you to look at the theme in a new way.

Dread sounds awesome. Before this discussion, I had never considered that orthogonal gameplay might have advantages. I'm still kind of skeptical though. Is orthogonal gameplay just a first draft that can always be trumped by a more resonant mechanic or a narrative that is more suited for the mechanic? I suppose Dread (in comparison to D&D) is a good example of how one mechanic may not necessarily be better than another, it might just evoke an interesting perspective on the narrative which wouldn't have occurred without it. I've thought about this problem before, but always with the goal of reducing ludo-narrative dissonance rather than considering what it can offer the narrative.

When I make it to the City of Gold I have to make an effort to remind myself that just because it's made of gold, that doesn't mean it won't kill me.

Here are the planned features for the bible game. http://mobile.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+21 We think that we will be able to implement all of the rules of Leviticus 21 by March, but we are still working on the bug that showed up when we implemented Leviticus 18; when the population gets low, there is a downward spiral in the favor-with-the-Lord value, and we aren't quite sure why.

One If my priests got honey in his hair and had to shave his head, I lost my magical bonus.

The orginal blog post was that Emily Short article we've been discussing in the Gone Home thread. http://emshort.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/reading-and-hypothesis/ I haven't played Stride and Prejudice, but I have an idea of what John Scott Tynes is proposing. When playing an endless runner, the mind focuses in a specific way that may open some doors of perception at the expense of closing others. Every activity requires some level of focus. The suggestion is that different activities evoke different types of focus and those states can make the player more receptive to various types of information. I mean, we know this; Tony Hawk makes me see the landscape in terms of rail-slides while Gears of War encourages me to see it in terms of cover. But John Scott Tynes is giving a more abstract anectdote where getting into the focus of an endless runner had the side-effect of making him receptive to the entirety of Pride and Prejudice. Typically the discussion of how game-mechanics and narrative relate is that the narrative motivates the player to continue to play. This is a case where the game-mechanic happens to make the narrative more digestable. This reminds me of the memory-castle technique in mnemonics. By imagining information as objects placed in a familiar space, people can remember a greater quantity of things. The reason for this is that our the spatial memory portion of our mind typically has more capacity. I'd love to have a catalog of all the mind-states specific game-mechanics evoke, and then see how various forms of information are recieved when in those mental-states. I think it's an interesting idea. Would I be able to retain the details of my health-insurance policy if I was presented with sentences from the policy every time I made a match-three? Maybe I would have an easier time with understanding the mathematics of game-theory optimization if constants were tied to skill-unlocks in an RPG.

The idea of seeing how players game the system in a biblical setting to the point of absurdity appeals to me. How cool would it be if the game was just a survival-sim where they wrote in rules that evaluated whether or not a player just disobeyed some law from Leviticus and then rained frogs on them. A systems-based bible game = awesome.

You and Steve seem to be suggesting that the game is a narrow depiction of a static subject. That may be the reality of how the game is made, but when I read positive responses to Gone Home, the authors are responding to what they see as expressive representations of characters, their circumstances and their relationships. It is reasonable that criticism would attempt to show ways the game failed to reflect what many think it represents (kinda paradoxical isn't it?), and suggesting possible solutions.

I'm not sure what you are asking. I may have shortened Merus's quotation too much

Is this true? I haven't played much IF so I'm not aware of any examples where human connections are emphasized more, or meaningful story is a bigger part of the game than Gone Home.